The Snow Queen

by Amy Ehrlich (Adapted By), Susan Jeffers (Illustrator), Hans Christian Andersen

When the coldhearted Snow Queen abducts a young boy, Gerda begins a magical and perilous journey to find him and release him from the Snow Queen's treacherous spell. Follow Gerda in this sparkling retelling of the classic fairy tale, as she sets out on her dangerous quest to the frozen north. Sparkling new jacket art, recolored and newly rendered interior art, and silver foil borders all add to the beauty of this glorious, large-format reissue.

Genres: Fairy Tales, Childrens, Picture Books, Classics, Fantasy, Fiction, Christmas

40 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Amy Ehrlich is the author of more than thirty books for young readers and is also a winner of The Dorothy Canfield Fisher Award for her novel Joyride, which was also chosen Booklist Choice Best Book of the Decade. She lives on a farm in Northern Vermont with her husband and a great many domestic and agricultural animals.

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well it goes without saying that if I am going to read one from a series I am going to dig them all out and read the lot- And here we are. I will be honest when I read this book for the first time I didnt realise the publisher had released others so its only fair I read them all together and I enjoyed as much this time and i did the first


This books was bought for me as a gift - (seems there are still a few hardy souls out there who dare to buy me books) and I have to say I am very impressed.

The story itself is a re-telling of the the Hans Christian Anderson Snow Queen with a few changes however the real start is the art.

This books really is a showcase of the Ukrainian artist Vladyslav Yerko who has create a series of unique pieces to accompany the story, some of small panels where others are full two page creations.

To me they help bring the story alive with their interpretation and creativity. But what is more there are so many subtle and hidden details you really need to go through each piece to really appreciate it. What is more there are hidden details that if you want to you can go back through them to spot. This really is a great book one now just for children.

[Abigail · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Snow Queen, illustrated by Susan Jeffers.

Retold by Amy Ehrlich and illustrated by Susan Jeffers, this version of Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen was originally published in 1982, and recently reprinted in a new edition. Ideal for younger children, who might not be able to sit still through the entire seven-chapter original, it is significantly abridged. The basic shape of the story is the same, with all the important episodes of Gerda's journey retained, but many of the details, and descriptive passages, are omitted.

As someone who loves the original tale, I can't say that I am particularly pleased with the narrative results, although I understand why some parents might feel differently. Susan Jeffers, who has also illustrated Andersen's The Wild Swans and Thumbelina , creates an appealing world of enchantment, with her pen and ink artwork. All in all, a pleasant adaptation, and, if one is determined to read an abridged edition, probably one of the better options available.

[Elliott · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my absolute favorite fairy tales with gorgeous illustrations

[Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

The illustrations are absolutely gorgeous!

[RumBelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful adaptation of Anderson's fairy tale. The illustrations just evoke winter and snow, with a hint of sparkle. The detail is amazing.

This is a wonderful story about friendship, and what it means to fight for the people you care about. Gerda is an amazing character. The lengths she is willing to go to rescue her best friend is extraordinary. Even if at times she is afraid, she will not abandon Kai.

The Snow Queen herself is one of the most mysterious characters from fairy tales. She turns out to be a good person, but her methods are curious to say the least. She is not what you would call a hero, but she it not a villain either. Very enigmatic, and that makes this one of the most intriguing fairy tales.

[thekwinrudi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a sucker for fairy tales and this is one no exception.

The Snow Queen teaches you about courage, to believe in the goodness of everyone and to keep the faith alive. Gerda is one strong child to have overcome the hardships in order to save her best friend.

I like the idea that this is not your typical fairy tale. The damsel-in-distress is Kay and not Gerda. It gives she-power a whole new meaning.

The Snow Queen symbolizes the fear that one must overcome and I like the idea that she was represented only as such - not as another villain one really has to fight.

A bonus for this book is the wonderful illustration. It makes reading more pleasurable.

[Meleofa · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful re-telling. And such beautiful illustrations.

[Bryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love the original stories as compared to the Disney children's fairytale versions. I mean it's great that they've adapted them for kids, but always sad to see the bubble burst when they learn the real story. I've always enjoyed the originals.

[Mike Jorgensen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very cool illustrations, the story is only ok. If the story was a bit more coherent I was going to start reading it to my daughter as a hipster version of Frozen.

[inhonoredglory · Rating 5 out of 5]

So how does The Snow Queen relate to Disney's Frozen?

I won't go into huge detail over particulars, just name a few things that both film and book share, especially thematically. Both tales carry a theme about love and its many forms (the Andersen tale also includes a strong moral on the smearing of innocence that leads to destruction, and the perils of innocence's opposite -- industrial progress). The different adventures of Gerda all represent a progression of love, of possession. The old lady who wanted to hoarde her, the Princess who thought love was choosing a man who was handsome and talked well, the robber maiden who captured her pets for her own amusement. And then there is Gerda, a legion of angels in her breath, the Lord's Prayer on her lips, a power within her worth more than a dozen men and lasts longer than all the creations of men: true love.

That's where this little tale threads to the Disney film that claims origin to its story. Anna and Elsa's love are as Gerda and Kay's. Their childhood of fun is turned to separation when winter comes, with Anna (Gerda) only able to see her sibling (in blood or in spirit) through a small peephole of a window, or a keyhole. Anna meets many people on her adventure and on the journey to locate her sibling, all of them representing love in its different forms: Hans, like the Princess of the tale, is almost shallow in his view of love, "true love" found so quickly and from nothing more than a day's meeting and a quick-witted word. The stone trolls are unconventional, rude, unlikeable, like the robbers Gerda meets along the way. Yet like the robber maiden and her mother, the trolls have a "pure love" within their clan. Olaf the snowman is the pure representation of a child's love and innocence, like Gerda is in Andersen's tale. Kristoff is the representation of a pure romantic love, which was not quite represented in the original tale, but acts as a foil to the Hans romance.

There is a reindeer, a homely house that is warm and gives her supplies against the cold, living snow creatures that defend the Snow Queen's home, a blizzard-swept finale on a frozen lake, and, of course, the expression of love that thawed little Kay's frozen heart and Elsa's cold soul. And as with the love of Gerda and Kay, so with Anna and Elsa:

"and wherever they went, the winds ceased raging, and the sun burst forth."

[Irene · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was inspired to read The Snow Queen after watching Frozen, which was loosely based on this story.

Certainly I can see how Frozen was seeded by ideas from The Snow Queen. In this book, there is a brief mention of trolls, a child's heart is frozen by being pierced by a sliver of a broken mirror (in the movie, a child's heart is frozen by being pierced by ice), there is a Snow Queen, there's a reindeer, and in the end, someone is saved by someone else's love.

That's pretty much where the similarities end, though. In The Snow Queen, a young girl named Gerda leaves in search of her childhood friend Kai, who was lured away from home by the Snow Queen, and she has lots of adventures along the way. It's kind of rambling, and maybe her search even comes across as kind of a quest. She encounters more than one old woman who knows magic, but luckily none of them are evil. She crashes the honeymoon of a princess and her new prince, she runs into a band of robbers in a forest, and she teams up with a friendly reindeer.

Happily, the story ends well, and it had all sorts of elements that made it fairy tale-ish: magic, talking animals, flower gardens, something of a lesson in stranger danger. I guess I didn't give it a higher rating mostly because the title character remained a mystery. She wasn't exactly good - she did basically kidnap Kai - but she wasn't exactly evil, either. Who was she, really? Also, the young robber girl confused me, too. She wanted to play with Gerda, and she ultimately helped her on her mission, yet she liked to see animals suffer, and she threatened to kill Gerda herself. I just didn't get her.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

#Binge Reviewing My Previous Reads: #Classic fairy tales with Modern Implications

Amy Ehrlich’s The Snow Queen—her retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s crystalline, seven-part fairy tale—sits at the intersection of myth, modernity, and memory, refracted through the lenses of postmodern thought like light through a frozen shard of glass.

To engage with it today is to navigate not merely a narrative of childhood friendship tested by icy forces, but a palimpsest of cultural anxieties: gender roles, the commodification of innocence, and the collapse of binaries like warmth/cold, faith/reason, and male/female. What appears, at first glance, as a simple fairy tale of good conquering evil unfolds into an unstable text where meaning fractures and proliferates endlessly.

At its heart, the Snow Queen herself resists stable categorisation. Is she a villainess, seductress, goddess, metaphor for alienation, or a projection of Kay’s wounded psyche? In Ehrlich’s crystalline language, she glides beyond essentialist categories.

Through a Derridean lens, she becomes an undecidable figure—a différance embodied in ice, simultaneously absence and presence, maternal and lethal, erotic and sterile. She is both “there” as narrative necessity and “not there” as interpretive deadlock. Any attempt to nail down her meaning melts like snow upon contact with the warmth of analysis.

Kay’s shard of mirror, embedded in his eye and heart, is the quintessential postmodern object. It is the “trace” of the Real, an external supplement that both corrupts and defines him. Once infected by this fragment, he perceives the world through a lens of distortion, where beauty appears grotesque and tenderness seems foolish.

Here, Andersen anticipates Lacan’s theory of the fractured subject: Kay is alienated not by the Queen alone, but by the symbolic intrusion of a mirror that reveals nothing and everything at once. The shard is, in effect, ideology crystallised—a miniature apparatus that makes him misrecognise the world, just as postmodern subjects misrecognise the operations of power in consumer culture.

Gerda’s journey, by contrast, plays like a feminist counter-narrative disguised in pastoral and pious clothing. On the surface, she is the archetypal child heroine, pure in faith, rescued by her own innocence. But in a deeper register, her relentless pursuit is an act of agency. She traverses kingdoms, confronts witches, flowers, animals, and royalty, remapping the social order as she moves. Postmodern criticism would frame her journey as a nomadic deterritorialisation in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense: she destabilises borders, refusing the stable domesticity imposed on her at the beginning. If Kay represents the fractured male, Gerda embodies a fluid female subjectivity that negotiates multiplicities. She is neither damsel nor conqueror but a kind of rhizomatic energy that adapts and survives.

What is striking in Ehrlich’s retelling is her sensitivity to Andersen’s shifts in tone—the oscillation between mythic grandeur and uncanny absurdity. These tonal shifts mirror what Lyotard called the postmodern condition: incredulity toward meta-narratives.

The fairy tale doesn’t settle into a single register of Christian allegory, nor does it fully resolve into psychoanalytic allegory. Instead, it wavers, mocks, and reconfigures itself as a patchwork of narrative fragments. The reader is left with the sensation of a story that points to transcendence while simultaneously sabotaging its own transcendence.

The Snow Queen’s palace, with its endless expanses of frozen geometry, is architecture as ideology: pure form, devoid of warmth, a cathedral of modern abstraction. It recalls Baudrillard’s hyperreal: a palace of signs without referents, where Kay is trapped not by chains but by the seduction of form itself. He plays endlessly with ice fragments, arranging them into patterns, seeking meaning but finding only repetition. This futile play allegorises the postmodern subject lost in the play of signifiers—seeking the Word but encountering only words, shuffling endlessly in the frozen archive of language.

In this sense, the tale anticipates the postmodern critique of rationality. Kay’s obsession with icy geometry, his insistence on cold clarity, mirrors Enlightenment rationalism carried to its extremes. Gerda’s tears—warm, irrational, embodied—become the disruptive force that saves him. The dialectic is not between good and evil but between two epistemologies: cold abstraction and embodied affect. If Kay is modernism, Gerda is postmodernism before its time: fluid, embodied, contingent, and relational.

Yet the resolution, when Gerda’s love thaws Kay’s heart, is not a tidy victory. It is a reassertion of relational subjectivity against solipsistic isolation, yes—but the story ends with the recognition that both children have aged, that innocence is forever lost. This is no cheap happy ending but a meditation on temporality, on the irreversibility of experience. Here we glimpse Benjamin’s angel of history: children propelled forward, unable to return to innocence, even as they imagine themselves “home”.

What, then, is the Snow Queen in a contemporary reading? She is globalisation’s chill, technology’s abstraction, the algorithm’s seduction of form without content. She is the cold perfection of late-capitalist spectacle. Kay is the subject captured by this logic, entranced by geometry and calculation. Gerda is resistance: embodied memory, care, and affect. Her tears are not merely sentimental but subversive, restoring the possibility of human connection against the frozen rationalities of empire and algorithm.

Amy Ehrlich’s retelling allows us to see Andersen’s tale not as a quaint parable but as a palimpsest of modern anxieties: about childhood, about gender, about reason’s icy seductions.

Read postmodernly, The Snow Queen is less about conquering evil than about resisting abstraction, about melting the frozen geometries that imprison us. Its final lesson is that meaning is not found in palaces of ice but in the fragile warmth of relation—always melting, always temporary, but always necessary.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

First read 5 June 2014
Reread 25 January 2016

This is a beautiful adaptation of Andersen's original tale. I appreciate the shortening of some segments, which made the story more of an adventure and less tedious. The illustrations looked etched and are so detailed and beautiful.

[teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Giving this 5 stars because this story was a favorite of mine as a child and still holds a special place in my heart. This edition has gorgeous illustrations and is perfect to cozy up with for an hour or two to read.

[Emily]

Probably my favorite fairy tale growing up!

[Jenna Mills · Rating 4 out of 5]

Creepy and beautiful

[Kara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well done re-write of the original text to make it more accessible for a young reader but still containing the essence of the story. The illustrations are charming, and I liked how the text and illustrations worked together of each doing different things at parts; not everything described was illustrated, and some of the illustrations filled in for some of the text that was probably cut for time - such as the life sized doll soldiers shown guarding the flower garden. Still, I wish Ehrlich had kept the second appearance of the Robber Girl at the end.

I loved how Gerda was portrayed throughout, especially the emphasis on how Gerda keeps losing her shoes, and her wandering the ice palace wonderfully plays up the ice and snow aspect as something covered in snow, rather than made of snow (a subtle but important difference in showing it as being a place you don't want to be) and makes a wonderful contrast to the earlier warmer settings.

Overall, a charming retelling of the Snow Queen.

[Wendy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I remembered seeing an animated version of this story as a child, but in that I remember the snow queen coming from out of nowhere and basically abducting the children. It sort of traumatized me actually. This year, I read it as part of the challenge to see what happened with the children. The thing I would say is that Hans Christian Anderson's stories tend to be a downer. Mainly what I would say here is that there isn't an explanation of why the snow queen took the child in the first place. What was her motive? It isn't explained. However, when I read it (and looked at the cover) I did notice the similarities between that her actions and appearance of the White Witch in "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe." I did some research and found out that was with good reason. Evidently C.S. Lewis did borrow from this story to characterize the evildoer in his series. In "The Snow Queen" she is not overtly evil, but takes actions that are not explained and separate the boy from those who loves him until and unless rescue comes.

[Lagobond · Rating 4 out of 5]

I appreciate the fact that, unlike many (most?) other English-language editions of The Snow Queen, this edition spells Kai's name correctly. ("Kay" is a girl's name, y'all!)

The writing is done well and feels authentic to the story. The illustrations are interesting, with great use of texture, and definitely capture the spirit of the tale. I can't help feeling, however, that Jeffers' images can't hold a candle to Bagram Ibatoulline's breathtaking art. Now if only I could find a way to combine the text in this edition with Ibatoulline's illustrations, I'd have a 10 star book.

For fairness' sake, I should add that had I not come across Ibatoulline's paintings prior to reading this edition here, I would have given 5 stars for sure.

[Patricia Bleile · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book has a lot of different style of illustration. I would use this in the classroom as a way of teaching the students about the different styles of illustrations and how they vary between each book or story.

[Hope Irvin Marston · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Susan Jeffers' artwork so it was a treat to find this book at my local library last week.

[Kat · Rating 3 out of 5]

While the pictures are pretty the writing is dull.

[Melanie Gaum · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not the best version of The Snow Queen. Story was clunky and some things weren't explained well. Illustrations were okay.

[Pinky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gerda saves Kai from a life in the palace of the Snow Queen.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

The illustrations are gorgeous!

[Logan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully re-told. This took about half an hour to read to the kids while at GG's house.

[Rosie Gearhart · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lovely illustrations. Mediocre abridgement.

[Kimberly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Newts 2020 - Charms E: Set in Winter

[Angela · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some of the art work was beautiful, but I thought this story was very creepy and sad. It made me feel lonely and anxious.

[Saffron Moon]

This rating is for the edition adapted by Amy Ehrlich and illustrated by Susan Jeffers.