And he can bring her back - if Cassie will agree to be his bride. He tells her that her mother is alive, imprisoned at the ends of the earth. Then, on her eighteenth birthday, Cassie comes face-to-face with a polar bear who speaks to her. Cassie lives with her father at an Arctic research station, is determined to become a scientist, and has no time for make-believe. Now that Cassie is older, she knows the story was a nice way of saying her mother had died. When Cassie was a little girl, her grandmother told her a fairy tale about her mother, who made a deal with the Polar Bear King and was swept away to the ends of the earth. When I heard last year that Sarah Beth Durst's next novel would be an adaptation of this tale, I admit there was a teeny tiny instant in which I thought, another one, and wondered why, and how it might distinguish itself from the others. I love the fairy tale "East of the Sun, West of the Moon." I have two picture book versions (PJ Lynch and Mercer Mayer), and two novel adaptations of it ( East by Edith Pattou and Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow by Jessica Day George), all of which I love. I haven't done a book recommendation in a while, but I am motivated to do so this morning, having just closed Sarah Beth Durst's new novel Ice!
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