Snow in Summer is pretty good. It’s a retelling of the Snow White story, set in mid-1900s Appalachia. Snow in Summer, called Summer, is seven years old when her mother dies. For four years her father sinks deeper into his sadness, and Summer is cared for primarily by her mother’s cousin, Nancy. Then one day, her father comes home–seemingly happy again–with a new stepmother.

The sense of dread in this book is incredible. As soon as Stepmama shows up and starts calling Summer “Snow” instead of “Summer,” you are taken over with tension. Stepmama’s malevolence toward Summer (now always called Snow) manifests in a dozen different ways, and Summer isn’t able to predict what they will be. When Stepmama tells Summer that she may attend church with Aunt Nancy until she turns fourteen, at which point she must attend Stepmama’s church instead, you aren’t exactly sure what Summer should be afraid of, but you’re terrified of whatever it is. This tension builds and builds and builds until the crucial moment, when Stepmama abandons Summer with a boy she calls Hunter.

So two-thirds of the book is this rising, rising, rising dread, and that’s very good, but the final third was a let-down. Once Summer reaches the dwarves’ house, the rest of the fairy tale plays out quickly. The ending feels too easy: I didn’t want Summer to have to be rescued by a Prince Charming we hadn’t met yet (and she isn’t), but the way Stepmama eventually meets her defeat happens so fast. I wanted the battle to be more battley. I wanted the ascending levels of danger from the fairy tale: First the ribbon, then the comb, then the apple. I am an unabashed partisan for the ascending tricolon.

Other reviews: Kirkus and Publishers Weekly were both quite positive! The Book Smugglers felt more like I did about it.

And hey, I can’t be the only one: What authors seem like they would be a perfect fit for you, but aren’t?

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They are all about a girl called Jenna who lives in a Hame, a place for women – often abandoned as children – who believe in the goddess Alta.  Jenna, who has had three mothers and been orphaned thrice, is believed by some to be the prophesied queen, the Anna, who will bring about some unspecified but very important change.  Jenna is not in love with this idea.  It makes her life harder, poor little sausage.  But she carries on, defeating the appropriate foes as the prophecy suggests, and falling madly in love with a king’s son, and calling forth her dark sister, Skada, who appears at her side in the night-time, only when there is light to cast a shadow.

Anyway I just reread them, to see, and these are still quite good books.  Jane Yolen does a thing that I love, which is that she has the story itself, and then she quotes bits from the Book of Alta, and then she has bits that are legends, and you can see how these folk tales have grown out of different parts of Jenna’s story, and then she has excerpts from what she calls “The History”, which is a scholarly study of the events of the book, from a distance of many years, and it gets everything completely wrong and makes fun of the scholar Magon who is coming close to getting things right.  This is fun.  Oh, and she has songs also, which like the folk tales have grown out of the events of the story we’re reading.

In bits maybe it takes itself a smidge too seriously?  But mainly it’s an excellent story.  Jenna’s world, particularly the bits with the sisters in the Hames, is very well imagined, with lots of good details around the dark sisters and just the way the Hames function generally.  I wouldn’t have minded having more bits set in the Hames, seeing how the sisters get on with their everyday lives after they are adults, but that’s just my preference.

Also, I miss Maine.  We used to go on vacation there every summer when I was a kid, and there was (still is!) this bookshop in Wells, where we stayed, called Annie’s Book Stop, and it was great.  That’s where I got my copies of Sister Light, Sister Dark, and White Jenna.  It was a damn exciting day.  And I miss Maine.  All with the bookshops we would go to that were used, and Fun-O-Rama, and we would go to this excellent restaurant called Allison’s in Kennebunkport and we would sing “Alice’s Restaurant” only we’d call it “Allison’s Restaurant”, and the beach was all nice and the water was all cold.  That was nice.

Let me know if you’ve read these and I will link to you! 

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