Ice by Sara Beth Durst
Once upon a time, a maiden had to marry a polar bear.
All her life, Cassie lived in an Arctic research station. She learned to shoot tranquilizer darts instead of playing video games. She is homeschooled by her dad (her mom is dead) and by her grandmother. Dad focuses on science. Gran tells the story of the Daughter of the North Wind, who ran away to marry her boyfriend, instead of the Polar Bear King the way her father promised. The North Wind punished her by sending her to the land of the trolls.
Dad hates that story. Before Cassie turns ten, Gran leaves to the mainland, and Dad has sole charge of Cassie’s education. Cassie absolutely loves the snow and ice, and Sara Beth Durst creates an Arctic scene that will draw in readers who prefer snow over the beach, the beach over snow, and even readers who prefer indoors to outdoors.
Though the station is manned by several men, the Arctic environment is the most interesting and well developed character. Cassie knows which ice is hard-pack and safe, and knows to be careful when the winter’s 24 hour darkness gives way to summer’s 24 hour sun. Ice melts, cracks into floes, and behaves entirely like the real Arctic, not like a fairy tale’s ‘and there was ice all around.’
Cassie is a modern girl, with GPS, a career plan, and no interest in or experience with housework. (In fact, housework does not seem to exist in the Arctic station, which I find moderately peculiar. Who does the laundry in this isolated place? Who washes the dishes, or unloads the dishwasher? Does it do itself, with no human intervention?)
The day before her eighteenth birthday, Cassie tracks an absolutely enormous polar bear, which runs impossibly fast - no bear should be able to outrun her snow-mobile for hours. At long last, she chases it to a halt and shoots a tranq dart at it. It pulls the dart out and dives into the solid ice.
Cassie knows she’s not crazy, and she didn’t imagine this. There has to be a reasonable answer. A scientific answer. Dad’s explanation - it’s magic - can’t be real. Her scientist dad, who always hated the polar bear story, cannot possibly be telling Cassie that the story is true. And her mother isn’t dead, she’s trapped in the land of the trolls because the North Wind didn’t want his daughter to get married.
Cassie stomps outside and calls the polar bear, not expecting anything to happen, but too mad to do nothing. Bear shows up - and returns the tranq dart. She climbs on Bear’s back, he runs along the ice pack to the North Pole.
Cassie, consults her GPS. They are not at 90 degrees, which is the North Pole. They are at 91, an impossible place. A place of magic. And the magic bear offers to marry her. Cassie, furious at her dad for being a coward who abandoned his wife to the trolls, makes a bargain. If Bear will rescue her mother, the original bride, then Cassie will marry him.
This marriage has separate bedrooms, though Bear turns into a human at night. Cassie has an axe, to keep it that way, but bear accepts her decision. He doesn’t want an unwilling wife.
Bear courts his wife and, day by day, convinces her to stay a little longer in his beautiful ice castle. Cassie already loves the ice, but can she stand the isolation? Bear provides food by magic, and Cassies loves watching it rise out of the ice table. Eventually, she falls in love with Bear, but babies are a problem: He wants one, she doesn’t.
At last she pines for her family, and begs to go home. (A familiar theme in fairy tales, where the magic and wonders are no substitute for family.) Bear takes her home, and she will call him when she is ready to return. It is assumed, of course, that she will return. At home, she finally meets her mother. She also figures out a way she can be helpful to Bear, though her family assumes that she’ll never go back to him. After all, she is not allowed to look upon his human form. She must trust that he is not as monstrous by night as he is by day. Can Cassie live like that all her life? She doesn’t care. She finds BC pills in the medicine cabinet, and goes home with her husband, to truly live as husband and wife at last.
She brought her sheaves of computer-printouts, and she is going to help Bear save all the polar bears, even better than the way she planned to originally, with college and research and papers in prestigious journals. No prestigious journal will publish anything with a talking polar bear as the source. (Cassie is not the type of girl who deals with the National Enquirer, which would probably pay quite will.)
Bear sabotages the birth control pills with magic. When Cassie is figures out why she is vomiting every morning, she is as horrified as any woman who thought she was safe. On the other hand Bear is truly bewildered - he thought she would be happy. Bear, unlike modern men, has no concept of how BC works, or even that it exists. He still managed to sabotage it, to trap and control his wife, like an abusive spouse. Cassie, like many trapped women, can’t get out. She must deal with her anger, feelings of betrayal, and awareness that her husband controls her access to the rest of the world. And she has a job to do with him. The polar bears are thriving more than last year, thanks to her research.
In the original fairy tale, East of the Sun and West of the Moon, the maiden is useful by weaving clothing for her husband’s human form. When she spies on him one night, candle wax drips on the shirt she made herself. This will be very significant later in the story. Cassie uses a flashlight to spy on her husband, so no wax drips.
Her looking at his human shape triggers a disaster - he is kidnapped by the same trolls who once held Cassie’s mother.
In this modern fairy tale, Ms. Durst knows that Arctic ice is not a monolith once the sun comes up - the eternal sun melts ice, and traps Cassie. Her pack only has food for a week. She must use all the knowledge she gained at the Arctic station to save herself before she can rescue him.
The magical people she relies on to help her rescue Bear have their own agenda, touching the modern ‘flower pot syndrome’, the trope of treating a pregnant woman as a vessel for her embryo with no rights or desires of her own. Here, she must use knowledge learned from Bear to save herself before she can rescue him. Housework is involved. Cassie is bewildered.
At long last she reaches the Land of the Trolls. You knew this was coming, didn’t you? Even if you never read the original, of course Our Hero will rescue her husband. But how? In East of the Sun and West of the Moon, the wife proposes a contest with the Troll Princess. Whoever can wash the wax off Bear’s shirt is clearly the better wife, and should marry him. Since the Hero wove the shirt herself, she is familiar with the fibers and knows how to use boiling water to re-melt the wax and scrape it off the hsirt. She wins.
Cassie couldn’t weave a shirt to save her own life, let alone her husband’s life, but she does know about polar bears, and she’s learned about magic, and what goes into making a life. She gained allies on her rescue mission, and though they are intensely self-centered, she learned how to present her needs in a way that will appeal to their self-interest. Not a bad negotiating tactic.
Ms. Durst turns a fairy tale older than the Brothers Grimm into a modern romance, complete with a protagonist too busy to be a feminist, a caring husband who gets it wrong, and loving parents who are, after all, just human and prone to error. The fairy tale is populated with various villains horrible not in body but in intent, villains who truly believe they are doing the right thing and the hero is in the wrong. The clash of ideas and the glory of the Artic pull the reader into the story from the first page until the satisfying end.