The Snow Queen - Mercedes Lackey

The Snow Queen
Mercedes Lackey
Luna Books
Copyright: 2008
ISBN: 9780373802654

The amazon.com product description:

Aleksia, Queen of the Northern Lights, is mysterious, beautiful and widely known to have a heart of ice. But when she's falsely accused of unleashing evil on nearby villages, she realizes there's an impostor out there far more heartless than she could ever be.

And when a young warrior disappears, Aleksia's powers are needed as never before.

Now, on a journey through a realm of perpetual winter, it will take all her skills, a mother's faith and a little magic to face down an enemy more formidable than any she has ever known…. 

I've read and reviewed The Snow Queen before, but it had been a while. This is one of the Five Hundred Kingdoms series of fantasy romance novels based on fairy tales, often with interesting twists, especially as each story doesn't always follow only one fairy-tale.

Imagine a world where fairy-tales are real, and they don't always have a happy ending. What's more, if your circumstances even vaguely match the setting for one of those tales, your life will be forced into following that tale. That's the world of the Five Hundred Kingdoms. Not even the Godmothers, one of the forces that try to either prevent the Tradition from steering people into those tales, or at least to give them a happy ending, is immune from the force of the Tradition.

Even so, these stories fit the romance mold, which means that the characters are going to have their happy ending. That's a given, right from the start. The story, and the fun of the read are all about how they get there.

I enjoyed the read this time, as much as I did last time. Especially as it's been long enough now that I felt like I was reading The Snow Queen for the first time again. One thing I noticed on this read was the number of spinning and weaving references. Being into fibre-crafts myself, they almost jumped off the page for me - weaving a cloak at the beginning of the story, one of the background characters doing some tablet-weaving and another spinning with a drop spindle in one of the scenes.

Overall, a fun read.