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Cover of The Snow Queen

The Snow Queen

core novel 2008 Five Hundred Kingdoms

Record

First published2008
Original language EN
Work typenovel
Canon statuscore
Reader rating3.81 (8,140 ratings, collected 2026-09-12)
Page count336
First-edition ISBN9780373802944
Internal chronology4

Synopsis

The Snow Queen follows Aleksia, a Fairy Godmother known within the Five Hundred Kingdoms as the Woman Wearing the Queenly Mask, whose specialty is mirror magic and who works to steer events unfolding under the pervasive influence of the Tradition, the force that pushes people's lives toward familiar fairy-tale patterns. As a powerful, unmarried woman in a position of authority, Aleksia must stay alert to the Tradition's tendency to send such women a deceitful suitor, a cad or a rake looking to exploit her position, even as her efforts to guide others through their own Tradition-shaped troubles routinely go unappreciated by the very people she helps. Her vigilance is tested as new complications arise that draw her personally into the kind of story she normally only manages from the outside.

Where it sits

Notes

  • From the series record (Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms): A completed 7-book sequence of standalone fairy-tale-retelling novels sharing one meta-fictional secondary world ("The Tradition", a narrative-causality force that pushes real lives toward familiar fairy-tale shapes), published 2004-2012 by Luna/Harlequin.

Neighbouring works

Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings, but they resolve to the exact same sequence for this book, so one combined line is shown instead of two identical ones.

Sources

← Five Hundred Kingdoms dossier · All universes

Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.