Why Snow White and The Snow Queen?

Hey everyone! In order to celebrate the release of Mirrors of Ice, today’s post is about why I decided to combine Snow White and The Snow Queen. Aside from the obvious bit of them both having the word “snow” in them. Minor spoilers ahead if you haven’t read Mirrors of Ice yet!

If you’re unfamiliar with the stories, you can read them for free here for Snow White and here for The Snow Queen.

This is another idea I’ve had for a little while, well, sort of, the idea didn’t quite look like the final project, but I’ve always really liked The Snow Queen. Or more specifically, I really wanted to explore one aspect of The Snow Queen in particular, the mirror shard in Kai’s eye. I knew I wanted to write a story that focused on what that would mean for a character.

So, I knew for sure I wanted to write a retelling of The Snow Queen, but I needed to find a fairy tale that I could merge it with. I looked through some fairy tales, but as soon as I thought of Snow White, I knew it was a perfect match.

Both fairy tales include: a magic mirror, a villainous queen, and a curse-breaking true love’s kiss

So, the question I started with was, what if my Snow White was also my Gerda figure? A very loose Gerda adaptation. The next question was who would be my Kai figure, and how would he fit into the Snow White aspect of the story? Also, what would I do with the whole seven dwarves aspect (which in other variations are robbers or giants, etc, essentially a group that takes Snow White in and helps her)?

I knew I was going to have to approach this book differently than I did Stalks of Gold. For Stalks of Gold, I had, fairly cleanly, divided the it into the first being one fairy tale, and the second the other, with the third pulling it all together in the climax. For this one, the fairy tales were going to be going hand in hand from the start. In some ways it was easier and in some it was harder. There’s no clear start or end to either fairy tale.

I really liked the challenge I gave myself with this one. There weren’t as many obvious cross-over points, but there was enough that I believed it was worth the effort. Besides, I was committed to doing a Snow Queen retelling, and layering it together with Snow White was a lot of fun. They’re both relatively popular, and there’s a lot of retellings of both, but if there’s another retelling that combines them, I haven’t seen it.

If you haven’t picked up a copy of Mirrors of Ice, you can do so here. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you all next time!