Oh no, it’s dreadful. There’s no redeeming moment or characters here, and it slides into him dominating her by the middle of the book, after a captivity segment that was tedious and free of any sort of enjoyable tension. And it’s not like the writer doesn’t know it, we even finish with an author’s note this is early career and they don’t think it’s very good.
The original Snow Queen is a lovely fable about a girl (Gerda) on an adventure to rescue her childhood friend, one that feels ancient without being actually all that old, dreamy, sharp and with a brutal edge lurking in the background. Gannon’s Snow Queen trying for an endearing villainess romance retelling, but mostly manages to replicate the experience of a creepy fantasy wanker in your inbox asking you to help him try out femdom and calls you Mommy without your consent. Before sliding into the even more annoying idea that dominant women want to be called good girl all along.
To accomplish this, the character of Kai goes from an urban dweller twisted by a shard of a beauty distorted mirror in his eye, to an immensely ham-fisted depiction of a neurodivergent person in a small village. He is still selfish, but rather than a remote coldness, now he impotently gets into trouble by making everyone’s lives harder, while we are supposed to think he is sympathetic were it not for being awkward. Gerda is now his sister, head shakingly tired of his antics, as is everyone else in the village.
Otherwise the theme is uwu cutsie, and peppered with modern references in an otherwise fairytale pastoral. The Snow Queen is significantly defanged to merely making threats, even an assassination attempt just being brushed off with a bit of thumping. She’s no longer an icy, fae like personification of winter, but the new sorcerer-monarch whose reign has been marked by complete disinterest in ruling due to her sulking. She started when she was 16, has ruled for 30 years and is written as if she got stuck at the age she started.
This is what powerful women need, to be proven as not as scary and humanized. Clearly.
Meanwhile, within day 2 of his captivity Kai is making pancakes and getting in trouble for starting fires without permission, has agreed with the Snow Queen that people in his village should be murdered, and is otherwise doing the usual gothic beauty and the beast retelling shit of offending the grump while befriending her talking animal minion. To justify his durance in the Snow Queen’s custody, this version’s Kai has to reassemble a shattered artifact the villagers broke. Which he is good at, but still bad at everything else. How bad he is at everything is being milked for comedy, and the more that teat is squeezed the more aware you get this is about as productive as milking a bull. Which is to say eventually painful.
The intent is that we are supposed to see her won over by his good heart. The reality is that actually the evil village Council member “Derriks” almost immediately becomes the most sympathetic character. He has tried to rebel against the Snow Queen with violence, but the narrative lets us know diplomacy has failed and the Snow Queen’s neglect is killing the village. His dialogue is cartoonish but deeply unfunny, yet ten minutes with the other characters you can see why he got voted in. Through his eyes we learn the hero, Kai, spends most of his time drunk, or wasting your time with poorly done presentations about how he is going to totally find artifacts that will return the village into a tourism hotspot.
I think we are supposed to take it, as a modern audience, that archeology is a worthwhile pursuit. Kai imagines if he can just uncover the early history of the village a place we have established is shit to do shipping through will suddenly host all sorts of visitors who want to see ancient but mundane relics. The book does a pretty good job of convincing us this isn’t the case, regardless of what the author intended. Kai not only bores and annoys the villagers, he bores and annoys me. When bad guy Derriks fantasizes about throwing him into the harbour, rather than emphasizing the character’s villainy, the main feeling I get is sympathy.
Even more damningly, the narrative gives us no explanation of how Kai got so good at archeology, which is incredibly lazy writing. You can do a neurodivergent awkward professor type character well, with the right grounding, but the text spends more time introducing Kai’s head of resentment that he isn’t special than it does anything else about him. He is an entitled ass with nothing to justify it. Not even to us. It would have taken absolutely not effort to sketch out any sort of self taught back story or demonstration of a technique better than digging up the local town square at random (yes, really) but the book prefers to spend its effort on interminable whining from Kai about how he isn’t even short or ugly, just average.
His attitude and treatment of the titular Snow Queen isn’t much better. It’s ironic that evil Derriks is depicted that way via having him leer over Kai’s sister, because that’s exactly what Kai does the moment he meets our female lead. Brooding mostly silent heroines of great potential violence are, themselves, not bad tropes, but we really lose something here by not getting her perspective until a quarter of the way into the book. When we do it’s even more disappointing. Apparently despite lots of emphasis there’s nothing remarkable about Kai, the Snow Queen immediately thought he was hot.
Unfortunately, while there’s a half hearted attempt at the trope of melting your dominant’s frozen heart, the cozy/comedy aspect of the story constantly undermines things with Kai’s cringe banter. It’s not funny, it’s a jerk finally reaching a point someone can stop him continuing to not take things seriously. Confrontations with the Snow Queen are tedious and frivolous, for example he is as concerned with disliking the soup as much as not getting to work on the project properly. This was written in 2013, there’s not even the start of a “it was a different time” argument here.
Of course in addition to displaying 0 respect for the female lead, he instantly puts his mind to determining if she is single, and because of the plot she also finds him inexplicably adorable. All while her wolf minion irreverently makes little comments to remove any remaining mystique. While there’s probably a clear overlap here with Disney’s Frozen for the book’s publication (also 2013) for the choice of the subject, it’s an achievement to manage a botched retelling where Kai is even more made the center of the universe than the nonsense Disney inflicted.
I think as far as failing its tension, in addition to just plain bad writing, this is a problem role reversal occasionally finds itself in where sexism plus fretting about the right kind of consent lead to a complete and repulsive defanging. The captivity plot is pure gender flip, but since the rest of the world is leering male counselors and Kai consistently treats her with the same disrespect he approaches everyone else, the impact is closer to a very specific male fantasy.
That one is that a sparkling perfect magical woman will see him, the saddest of sad sack schlubs, as a diamond in the rough. Her dominant aura will do all the work to make him feel horny/submissive and she will transform him while falling hopelessly in love. As a submissive fantasy, sure, but I have yet to meet a dominant who sees gross incompetence as hot. Since the target audience here is women, this is even more baffling.
And then we get this line, after he discovers her real name. Said un-ironically.
“You should smile more.” He said finally. “It… it suits you.”
This is pretty much Kai through and through. Not why she doesn’t smile, but then she, like everything else in the universe, exists for him, the main character. Basically she’s that joke by Kate Beaton.
http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=311
But weird gender dynamics aside, the other reason the book sucks is that it doesn’t respect its own narrative in favour of creating more opportunity for (failing at) clowning. During the pancakes scene we are told Kai, who is a cook at his family tavern, can actually make edible food. Despite this, the book wants to have a funny kitchen disaster some time later, and settles on him not knowing the difference between oil and vinegar when he fails at making lunch. This is despite being previously told he could cook reasonably well in a proper kitchen. The author just wanted to have a getting to know you kitchen scene where he gets to be a quirky screwball.
And of course the person he is supposed playing off doesn’t fit the role she’s been assigned either. She is treated like she’s the rules follower to his chaos, but the rest of the book has already established the Snow Queen is shirking responsibility and not particularly rules bound herself. The sub-genre might have dynamics like it was trying for enough people might expect it, but the book is lazy and poorly edited enough to ram this level of randomness into the text without backing it up.
The least said about the deeply unfunny random heroes who attack the better. Joke wasn’t good, characters added nothing. Tonally this feels like runtime padding. However, having fucked around enough to reach the middle of the book and to establish the characters are on speaking terms we abruptly switch to them having terrible sex where he rips her clothes off (destroying them) and tells her that he doesn’t have to listen to her and he is too good at sex for her to correct him. Kai, king of the losers, with no information for the audience about his past experience, is a sexual savant.
Then the artifact is fixed, the village rejoices and he then dominates her while she’s tied up with chains of ice. It’s not a good sex scene either. This is about as erotic as calling the tax office to make a correction.
That that’s just 60% in. The rest is more time wasting wank, unfunny banter, and no stakes confrontations with councilman Derriks. A happy ending is achieved, Kai gets everything he wants. The Snow Queen is slavishly devoted to him and he gets to enjoy a badass is at his beck and call and being special. The last part of this book was read with a fixed disgusted expression, all charity gone. If this wasn’t for review I would habe DNF’d ages ago.
Yuck. Who is this for? About the only thing this book serves to do is encourage you that if you worry you aren’t good enough for publishing to do it anyway. If this shit got 4.4 stars out of 167 reviews, your personal pet project can’t possibly be worse.
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