Unfortunately this one didn't grab me at all. I think I've been spoiled by the myriad retellings and reinterpretations of the snow queen as a concept, especially those that were primarily in visual mediums. By comparison, the prose here is flat, a lot of traditional fairy tale formulas and not much else. Furthermore the majority of the story is devoted to a child traveling around all sort of places and asking every single being she can find where her friend is. While it's nice that a girl rescues a boy for once rather than the other way around, the methods she uses are comparatively passive and don't, in my opinion, make for much of a story. Compared to the themes in "The Little Mermaid", for example, The Snow Queen lacks depth for me.