The Raven and the Reindeer: A Snow Queen Retelling For Pride Month

When The Raven and the Reindeer by T. Kingfisher was nominated as a June Book of the Month on a Goodreads group,  I was most interested in the Sami character that the nominator mentioned.  I have been interested in the Sami since childhood when my favorite book was Lapland Outlaw by Arthur Catherall.  The books that I've reviewed on this blog dealing with the Sami have been the thriller Forty Days Without Shadow by Olivier Truc  which I reviewed here and the mystery In The Month of the Midnight Sun by Cecilia Ekbäck which I reviewed here.  Although there is indeed a Sami character who plays an important role in The Raven and the Reindeer, she doesn't appear until late in the narrative.

Nevertheless, there were other very good reasons for me to read this T. Kingfisher book which I found delightful.  I'm glad that I purchased it on Amazon.

                             

The Raven and the Reindeer didn't become a book of the month, but there is currently an ongoing buddy read of the novel.  This is an adult retelling of The Snow Queen, a fairy tale by Hans Christian Anderson.   Participants, including me, have marveled about the elements from HCA's original tale that Kingfisher included which we hadn't remembered.  So it could be considered a fairly faithful retelling with several differences.

One difference is that the two crows in HCA's version are combined into one talking raven who is very snarky and entertaining.

Another more significant difference is that the protagonist needs to change shape in order to survive the cold of the journey to the Snow Queen's palace far in the north. Livli, the Sami character, has a very interesting idea about shapechanging.   She says that someone won't have barriers to such a transformation "when your own shape does not quite fit."  To me, this implies that non-cisgender individuals would be the humans who are most open to changing into another species.   Kingfisher doesn't actually explore this idea.  To my best knowledge, no one has written fiction about a pre-operative transsexual who also changes into an animal.   If someone has written fantasy or science fiction with that focus, I would love to read it.

The main reason why The Raven and the Reindeer was nominated for Pride Month is because it contains a lesbian relationship which definitely wasn't in HCA's original tale.  This relationship provided an ending to this retelling that made for a much better story for LGBT friendly readers.