How about a little queer romance to warm the icy chill of isolation? Robbergirl by S. T. Gibson, which came out last year, is a YA retelling of Hans Christian Anderson’s classic fairy tale “The Snow Queen.” While the original tale centers a young girl’s quest to save her loved one from the embodiment of winter, Robbergirl approaches the story from the perspective of the young thief who aids the other girl with her adventure and along the way learns the difference between loving someone and possessing them.
If you’ve read Hans Christian Anderson’s tale, you may remember a short interlude about the spoiled robber girl who waylays Gerda during her search for the Snow Queen. This is where Gibson’s novel begins. Teenage Helvig is already fed up with trying to wrangle her band of incompetent brigands, but when they stumble upon a beautiful young woman wandering the road alone who seems to be a witch, Helvig thinks she might finally have found a prize worth bringing home to her father’s camp. Gerda is unlike anyone Hevig has ever met—she is kind, dignified, and seems to always get what she wants merely by asking politely. Helvig longs to open up to her, but she comes to realize that she can’t be Gerda’s friend by acting as her captor. Gerda, meanwhile, is preoccupied by her search for her younger brother Kai, who has been captured by the Snow Queen. Helvig must ultimately decide whether to help Gerda with her quest, even if it might mean letting Gerda go and having to face her own demons.
Apart from the new point of view and the queer romance aspect, what differentiates Robbergirl from other Snow Queen stories is its unique take on the Snow Queen herself. In Anderson’s tale, she seems to just be an otherworldly being with no real origin—just an embodiment of the frozen north. But in Robbergirl, the stakes are more personal. The Snow Queen is a woman from Helvig’s past who has made a bargain with the spirit of the land in order to escape a miserable situation. In this sense, she is almost a Faustian figure—was her bargain worth it and is this existence really better than what she had before? Gibson’s Snow Queen is both monstrous and pitiable, and in this way is a more challenging villain for Helvig to take on than a mere abstract evil.
In fact, I loved Robbergirl‘s whole take on the supernatural. The novel draws on Northern and Central European folklore and religious tradition. In this region, it was commonly believed that Christmas was a time when the veil between worlds was thin, and that on Christmas Eve, recently deceased spirits would gather for a ghostly mass. Helvig and Gerda witness such a scene in one of the scariest moments of the book. Reading this book made me realize that the connection between ghost stories and the winter holidays goes back even further than the Victorian craze for spooky Christmas anthologies and solidified my feeling that we need to bring the tradition back! Nothing quite gets you in the holiday spirit better than scanning the faces of the spirits around you, looking for your lost loved one.
If you haven’t had the pleasure of reading Robbergirl yet, you can buy the ebook or paperback online from Amazon. If you have read it, I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments!