, by Edith Pattou, and Ice
, by Sarah Beth Durst.
Both books are pretty straight-forward retellings of the tale, which appears to be a Norwegian version of the "Beauty and the Beast" story: local man who is beset by problems loses a daughter to the polar bear king. The girl's family recovers their fortunes (a la "Beauty and the Beast"), but the girl is still in the bear's palace, where he gives her everything she ever wanted or needed. Ultimately, the girl longs for home, and the bear reluctantly lets her visit her family. She realizes how much she misses him, and returns to the bear, but after her return she violates an unspoken rule that she must never see his human face (because, of course, he is under a spell). Once she views him, he is forced to the troll queen's palace which lies "east of the sun and west of the moon," and the girl must find her way there to save him.
From a narrative perspective, I enjoyed East more, because of the layered voices, and the story telling. I found portions of Ice to drag a little too long, and some plot devices to be clunky (ultimately necessary, but clunky). For the retelling, though, I liked Ice better because Durst added some unique characteristics
Ice is told in 3rd person and follow's Cassie's point of view. Cassie works with her father at an arctic station tracking polar bears. When she tells her father about seeing a giant bear disappear into the ice, he reveals the secret of her mother's "death": her mother did not die, but has been held captive in the trolls' palace because of a bargain the North Wind made with the Polar Bear king.
Once she has identified the king, he speaks to Cassie, bargaining with her that he will rescue her mother from the trolls if she will consent to be his bride. At 18, Cassie isn't really ready to settle down with anyone, let alone a talking bear, but she agrees for her mother's sake.
Durst's primary twist on the original tale is her incorporation of what I assume are actual Inuit stories of the munaqsri (moon-awk-shree), the keepers of souls. The munaqsri are present at birth to provide souls to newborns, and at death the capture the dying soul and keep it in the cycle. If no one has died when a new being is born, there is no soul to provide, and the child is stillborn. Each species has its own munaqsri, but any soul that is lost at a death can be claimed by any other specie's munaqsri. Cassie learns hard lessons about death and its necessity as she ventures out to help Bear with his duties, and later on her own journey to rescue him.
Durst weaves in a subtle message of earth and equilibrium; without the polar bear munaqsri, there is no one to catch the souls of dying polar bears and impart them into new cubs. As the bears gather around Cassie to assist her in her quest to rescue Bear, they disrupt the arctic equilibrium by stripping all seal carcasses bare, which means the other species that depend on the bears' remains have nothing to eat. Later in the story, Durst also reminds us that flora have similar issues; Father Forest is innundated with requests from the various tree spirits to fix their environs (for instance, Aspen complains that the spruce are taking over the aspen roots and crowding them out). Balance must be maintained in order for the world to continue.
The trolls are another interesting innovation in Durst's retelling. Rather than being the ugly, ogre-ish creatures we generally visualize as trolls, Durst's creations are translucent, bodiless, jelly-fish like creatures. They have no life, and they want Bear for him to give them life, but he cannot. Cassie manages to rescue both herself and Bear when she realizes what will help the trolls (no spoilers...it's a unique twist that I found enjoyable). Interestingly, Bear does not magically return to human form at the end, either.
East's narrative style is quite different from Ice's. Pattou gives us multiple perspectives: Rose, her brother, her father, the Troll Queen, and the Bear. In that sense, I enjoyed this version more, because the story unraveled with different meanings and associations.
Superstition plays a much larger role in East. It is set in more of a "mythical" time (as opposed to a more-or-less contemporary arctic research station), and Rose's mother follows and falls prey to village lore. She firmly believes that the direction she is facing at childbirth helps determine the child's personality, with North being the most liable to wander and get into trouble. Even though Rose was supposed to be east-born, she is actually north-born, and her birth came associated with a prophecy of dying under snow and ice. In order to circumvent the prophecy, Rose's mother pretends she was east-born to the point that she forgets Rose's actual direction at all.
The family suffers more and more loss, until finally, one of Rose's sisters falls deathly ill. A white bear, who has actually been watching Rose her entire life, offers to restore the daughter to health if the family will let Rose go with him. Always a wild spirit, Rose agrees to the bargain, even before her family decides.
Again, following the more traditional fairy tale motifs, Rose finds a loom in the palace the bear takes her to, and weaves gowns of silver, gold, and a luminescent moon-like fabric. She uses these gowns later in the story to pay for passage to the trolls' castle and to wear in the trolls' presences to rescue the bear.
In Pattou's story, the bear really is an enchanted human. In his and in the troll queen's voices, we learn that he was a prince who was kidnapped by the troll queen when she was a princess and intended for her husband. Her father, the king at the time, berates her, because the humans they use are supposed to be nobodies, no one who will be missed. As a punishment, he turns the boy into a bear until the curse is broken. A human woman must live with him for one year without ever seeing his human form; the spell will break if that works, otherwise he will be immediately returned to the trolls for the intended wedding.
Rose's mother is her downfall in this version (again, very similar to the original tale) because she provides Rose with a candle that will stay lit even in the magically induced darkness the bear creates when he transforms from bear to human. Some of the candle wax drips on his night shirt, which wakes him to see the damage Rose has done.
Interestingly, Pattou gets some native aspects into her story as well. Rose manages to get to what is probably Greenland, where she meets a native shaman who helps her cross the ice bridge that leads to the trolls' palace. Native mythos isn't as interwoven as it is in Ice, but it does seem to fit within the overall narrative.
The rest of the story pretty much follows the expected patterns, so I won't go into details here (though I must admit that the freeing of the human slaves from the trolls' palace reminded me a great deal of Pullman's The Golden Compass
and the freeing of the children from the laboratory).
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