Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu
This is a take on "The Snow Queen," set in the modern world and with a heroine, Hazel, who was adopted in India by a white, American couple. (This is, I think, the only fiction I've read to take a look at that particular cultural trend and go "geez, I wonder what that's like for the kids, 10 years down the road...")
Hazel's life has recently been turned upside down: her parents recently got a divorce, forcing her to change schools. At her old school, she was considered imaginative and creative. At her new school she's considered withdrawn and not really connected to reality, existing in her own world in which her expansive library of children's literature takes a central role in her reasoning process, and her situation isn't aided by the fact that she sometimes has trouble communicating with people. (Note: Does anyone know if anyone has asked Ursu if she intended for Hazel to be read as ADD? Because I can't tell if I think it's deliberate, or if i'm over identifying and recognizing too much of my own 5th grade self.) In addition, her mother has decided that it's time for her to stop living in the clouds and conform more to conventional ideas of femininity and girlish interests and such. (In her mother's defense, I don't recall any indication that her mother actually thinks Hazel's relatively mild tomboyishness is bad, she just knows her daughter has problems and thinks that having "normal girl" interests will help her.)
Her only real friend, and the only person she feels can understand her, is Jack, who share's in her fantasy world and they do things like have superhero football and make magic forts and he gets when she communicates real world ideas and decisions through fictional allegories. But Jack is one of the things her mother feels she needs to "grow past," and Jack himself has started pulling away from Hazel and has befriended a pair of boys who like to harass Hazel.
Then one day, Jack's eye is mysteriously hurt, and shortly after, he disappears. When Hazel hears about a witch in the woods, a woman seemingly made of ice, who may have taken Jack, she gathers a survival kit and goes off into the woods to get him back. Except that the woods she finds herself in are not the same woods she entered, and the woods are full of frightening things pulled from all sorts of fables and mythology, all of which are frightened of the witch.
This is pretty great, guys! As I indicated before, I had more over-identification issues with Hazel at times, which may have increased my overall interest and investment, but I don't think I would retract my two thumbs up without that. My only complaint is that it really isn't addressed that Jack started being something of a jerk and bad friend to Hazel before he got the mirror shard in his eye, not just after, and i wish that had been dealt with.
There is apparently a quasi-sequel that just came out, but it's about other characters.
Hazel's life has recently been turned upside down: her parents recently got a divorce, forcing her to change schools. At her old school, she was considered imaginative and creative. At her new school she's considered withdrawn and not really connected to reality, existing in her own world in which her expansive library of children's literature takes a central role in her reasoning process, and her situation isn't aided by the fact that she sometimes has trouble communicating with people. (Note: Does anyone know if anyone has asked Ursu if she intended for Hazel to be read as ADD? Because I can't tell if I think it's deliberate, or if i'm over identifying and recognizing too much of my own 5th grade self.) In addition, her mother has decided that it's time for her to stop living in the clouds and conform more to conventional ideas of femininity and girlish interests and such. (In her mother's defense, I don't recall any indication that her mother actually thinks Hazel's relatively mild tomboyishness is bad, she just knows her daughter has problems and thinks that having "normal girl" interests will help her.)
Her only real friend, and the only person she feels can understand her, is Jack, who share's in her fantasy world and they do things like have superhero football and make magic forts and he gets when she communicates real world ideas and decisions through fictional allegories. But Jack is one of the things her mother feels she needs to "grow past," and Jack himself has started pulling away from Hazel and has befriended a pair of boys who like to harass Hazel.
Then one day, Jack's eye is mysteriously hurt, and shortly after, he disappears. When Hazel hears about a witch in the woods, a woman seemingly made of ice, who may have taken Jack, she gathers a survival kit and goes off into the woods to get him back. Except that the woods she finds herself in are not the same woods she entered, and the woods are full of frightening things pulled from all sorts of fables and mythology, all of which are frightened of the witch.
This is pretty great, guys! As I indicated before, I had more over-identification issues with Hazel at times, which may have increased my overall interest and investment, but I don't think I would retract my two thumbs up without that. My only complaint is that it really isn't addressed that Jack started being something of a jerk and bad friend to Hazel before he got the mirror shard in his eye, not just after, and i wish that had been dealt with.
There is apparently a quasi-sequel that just came out, but it's about other characters.