Kate Greenaway's Original Drawings for The Snow Queen
1960
- children's audiobooks
- children's literature
- children's stories, danish
- fairy tales
- translations into english
- translations into russian
- juvenile fiction
- animals
- juvenile literature
- folklore
The story
After the Snow Queen abducts her friend Kai, Gerda sets out on a perilous and magical journey to find him.
What it’s like
Delicate ink line and soft, muted watercolour washes, with rosy cheeks, bonneted children, and rounded trees and flower-strewn gardens drawn in the manner of Victorian nursery illustration. The pages are airy, with plenty of white space around each small vignette, so the reading pace is slow and unhurried. The snowy wastes arrive as pale blues and greys, and the Snow Queen herself is cool and remote rather than grotesque. Tone is wistful and gently eerie, closer to a bedtime story than a scare, with a steady undercurrent of a child's courage and loyalty. Intensity is low: peril and cold, a few stern or unsettling moments, but no gore and no violence beyond the fairy-tale kind. It suits a quiet afternoon, a read-aloud at bedtime, or a comfort reread, and it will appeal to people who love classic picture-book art, folklore in its original storytelling voice, and the soft, old-fashioned feel of illustrated fairy tales for children and the adults who read to them.
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