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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Odd and Uncomfortable, April 23, 2011
I had very high hopes for this book. I've read a few East of the Sun, West of the Moon retellings in the past few years (my favorite is Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow, but the illustrated East of the Sun and West of the Moon will always have a soft spot in my heart) and have been on the look out for more.
That being said, the best thing about this book is the cover.
The main characters, Cassie and Bear, are relentlessly unlikeable to me. Cassie goes into a deal expecting to get, essentially, something for nothing, as she can just nullify it and Bear has to keep his end of the bargain. This did not endear her to me. Bear does something in the first hundred pages that made me want to fling the book across the room (here's a hint, Bear: if a woman says she doesn't want to have children, you do not mess with her birth control so she ends up pregnant anyway). Granted, this could be put down as a misunderstanding on Bear's part, but it still made me cringe.
The relationship between Bear and Cassie is odd to put it mildly. He's a polar bear; there's an indication, early on, that he hasn't always been a polar bear and only assumed the form when he became a munaqsri, but that is still several centuries of life as a bear and it shows. The seal eating scene is particularly telling, in my opinion.
Cassie falls in love with this bear and sleeps with him (while he's human), which results in the aforementioned unwanted pregnancy. We're told that they have long conversations and that Bear created a statue of her in his ice garden, but we're rarely shown anything about the relationship; it's all Cassie musing about months that have gone by. It's hard to believe this relationship when we're barely shown it at all. Why is Cassie willing to go to the ends of the earth for Bear?
I thought the background of the book was an interesting concept, but I don't think the characters were strong enough to carry it through. I found myself skimming Cassie's journey (argueably the best part of the East o' the Sun mythology) because it dragged. I was thoroughly uncomfortable reading about both Cassie's and the munaqsri's reactions to her pregnancy, as well as the violations of Cassie's right to her own decisions about her body and actions.
And, frankly, I could have done without the scene where she suckled from a polar bear or the scene where she urinated on herself while being held captive.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Cold and Beautiful, December 5, 2009
This review is from: Ice (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
I love retellings of fairy tales, and this one's a honey. It would have to be frozen honey, though--there's more snow in this book than you'll find anywhere but in a biography of Admiral Peary. Durst has taken the Scandinavian Beauty and the Beast story, "East of the Sun and West of the Moon," and set it in the present day, giving us a girl who lives on an Arctic research station with her gruff father and his assistants.
Being a young scientist, Cassie is far from being inclined to believe in magic, though when she was little her grandmother used to tell her a seemingly fanciful story about how her missing mother was the adopted daughter of the North Wind, stolen by trolls after having bargained Cassie away to a magical bear.
Cassie thinks her father doesn't believe in fairy tales, either, but when she meets the Polar Bear King, her father panics. She realizes that her father has lied, and her grandmother's story is true. The bear returns, convincing Cassie to accompany him to his icy palace. There she learns to enjoy his company, eventually falling in love with him. (It helps that he takes the form of a man by night.)
But each will yet betray the other. In time Cassie wins her mother back, but at the price of her beloved. Now she must journey to the ends of the earth, fighting enemies with snarling faces, with smiling faces, and without any faces at all.
The author keeps the bones of the original tale, but uses them to build a new mythology linked to Inuit-type animal gods who preside over birthing and survival.
The original folktale, "East of the Sun and West of the Moon," is a story about being willing to do anything for the sake of love. Durst's retelling amplifies that feeling, with the stakes raised because her Cassie is going to have a baby.
Durst has a gift for communicating her cold setting to the reader:
"By evening, the sun was to her right. Ice crystals sparkled in a halo around the sun and in gold sheets around Cassie. The powdery mist cut visibility even more. She forced herself to concentrate on the ice in front of her. But even with all her concentration, she stumbled over invisible frozen waves. She had no depth perception in the glare of infinite whiteness. Her remaining eyelashes were icicles, framing her view of the world. Her nostril hairs had also frozen. She exhaled through her nose to keep it warmer. Her Gore-Tex pants rustled as she stumbled along. It was the only sound in the emptiness besides the huffing of the bears."
In the Arctic wilderness, Cassie encounters not only the dangers of ice and cold, but also creatures who could easily kill her. This heroine uses her knowledge of survival as well as relying on magical allies and trickster strategies to accomplish her goal of retrieving her shape-shifting mate.
It isn't easy to combine fairy tale elements with modern science, but the author makes it work, leading us smoothly through two overlapping worlds. For example, each chapter begins with latitude, longitude, and altitude. And animals such as the polar bears, while linked to the magic of their king, otherwise behave like ordinary wild creatures.
I was curious to see how the author would handle the trolls, but I should have guessed that her story's resolution would contain an intriguing twist, rounding out the unusual and moving new vision that Durst has created in Ice.
Note for Worried Parents: There's some discreetly handled sex in this book for teens, along with talk about birth control, pregnancy, and birth.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
One weird read, July 23, 2010
This review is from: Ice (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
I greatly enjoyed Sarah Beth Durst's MG novels, INTO THE WILD and OUT OF THE WILD. They're such fun and well-written and just go read them; you probably won't regret it. But ICE? Not so much.
I really wanted to like ICE. I did. For one thing, it's really nice to see an older teen as a protagonist in YA fiction. Also, the cover is beautiful, and I appreciated the science-minded heroine. Really, the setting is fantastic. It's set in the Arctic, where Cassie lives with her father, a researcher in a station. It's such a different setting for a fairy tale retelling. (In this case, it's EAST OF THE SUN, WEST OF THE MOON, which, I'll admit, is not one of my favorites.) But I think that's like the only positives I can say about this book. Besides that I liked Durst's trolls. I thought that was clever.
Basically, EAST OF THE SUN, WEST OF THE MOON is about this polar bear who takes this girl to be his wife, but every night, he climbs into her bed as a human, and he tells her that she cannot once see his face. The girl being curious disobeys, and then trolls come and take away the polar bear, and the girl has to go rescue him. Same deal with ICE. (Yay for fairy tales in which the female character actually does have to do some saving-the-day in the original story.)
And honestly, I had a hard time believing a modern-day young woman would fall in love with a talking polar bear. It just didn't sit right with me, and even if I tell myself that it's just a fairy tale and just an enchantment and he's not really a polar bear, but it just doesn't work. It creeped me out. The book also seemed to end somewhat suddenly, the climax just happening and then - last page. I would have liked more winding down. Also, I felt like Durst's writing was too simplistic for her audience. Her sentences didn't flow right. Add this into all the novel's weirdness and...it wasn't a good combination.
Like I said, I highly recommend INTO THE WILD and OUT OF THE WILD, but ICE? If you want to read it, I suggest the library.
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