Helvig, the teenage daughter of a Swedish robber king, haunts the frozen winter roads hoping a rich merchant will fall into her grasp. Instead, she captures someone more intriguing: a beautiful young woman traveling alone who claims to be a witch. Helvig brings her back to the robber hideout and begs her father to be allowed to host her for a while. Gerda, the witch, seems driven by an urgent, foolish, and dangerous errand- she wants to keep traveling North in the dead of winter in search of a brother who went missing years ago. Helvig convinces her to stay with the robbers until she's regained some strength. And so the two begin a winter of uneasy cohabitation, building a friendship and sharing a bed at night, but both keeping back secrets of their pasts and fears. A delightful, Sapphic retelling of "The Snow Queen" fairytale by Hans Christian Anderson as a young adult novel. This is a story I heard several times in my childhood, so I was familiar with all of the elements and it was a real pleasure to see how they had been reworked and transformed. Beginning the story with the meeting of Gerda and the Robber's daughter (an event that takes place in the middle of the original story) was a smart choice, and the amount of deeply queer yearning woven through kept me on the edge of my seat.