Of Swords and Parasols

When she was a child, Cassie’s grandmother told her a fairy tale about how the North Wind’s daughter was promised to the Polar Bear King as his bride, but fell in love with a normal man instead. The Polar Bear King, not wanting an unwilling bride, agreed to hide her and her lover from the North Wind if she would promise her daughter to him as a bride. Eventually, though, the North Wind found his daughter and, angry, blew her as far north as he could, abandoning her in the troll kingdom, where she became a slave.

As she grew up, Cassie realized that the fairy tale was her grandmother’s way of telling her that her mother was dead. Growing up in her father’s arctic research station, Cassie plans to enter the same field, and to get her college credit remotely, but her father changes her plans and insists that she leave with her Grandmother after a strange encounter with a bear. She learns why when the bear actually talks to her, and she learns her grandmother’s story is true, so she makes a bargain with him: she’ll honor her mother’s bargain and become his wife, as long as he rescues her mother from the troll kingdom.

The story is structured (sometimes loosely, sometimes tightly) around “East of the Sun, West of the Moon,” with some heavy influence from “The Snow Queen” and “The Polar Bear King,” and bits and pieces from other fables. (I’m trying to remember if the “North Wind’s daughter” story is one I’ve heard before, or if it’s unknown to me/a Durst original. It’s vaguely familiar, but I can’t place it.) Cassie is an American-if more nominally than anything else, I think-but the book is largely removed from both that and the European roots of the stories that inspired it, instead primarily focusing on Bear’s northern world, just beyond the edges of reality.

( spoilers )
In short: Pretty darn spiffy, despite one niggling plot point.