East of the Sun, West of the Moon

This original and moving book takes its inspiration from the Norwegian fairy tale of the same title, a folktale of the type known as ‘the search for the lost husband’, which is related to the story of Cupid and Psyche and to Beauty and the Beast. The author and illustrator Jackie Morris has taken the raw material of this story and woven it into a magical post-Pullman fantasy. The opening words, ‘In an iridescent sparkle of frosted light he appeared,’ made me worry that the tone was going to be too high-falutin’ and literary, but in fact Jackie Morris’s prose is both tautly readable and densely poetic. Her story of a talking polar bear with ‘hot, fishy breath’ who takes an asylum-seeking girl on a magical adventure is a brilliantly inventive, bittersweet modern romance, suitable for older readers. In many ways the unnamed heroine’s quest for her bear/prince lover is reminiscent of Gerda’s search for Kay in The Snow Queen, and Jackie Morris deftly acknowledges this when the girl meets the North Wind, who pleads with her to ‘Stay with me and be my Snow Queen’. The vivid images in this scene are typical of many in this finely-crafted book, which is always appealing to the inner eye: ‘He raised a collar of ice high around the back of her neck, finest lace, and on her head a crown of snowflakes threaded through with filaments of moon-gold. So light.’ The ending delicately twists the traditional storyline into a new shape, in a way that both satisfies and defies the reader’s expectation.