🎧 Emma's Library Audiobook cover: The Snow Queen

The Snow Queen

Classical Stories · No. 17 — A splinter of mirror, a frozen heart, and a girl who would not stop walking.

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About this audiobook

Kai and Gerda are as good as brother and sister, raised across a rooftop from each other with a rose garden between the window boxes. Then the goblin mirror — made to show everything good as shriveled and everything bad as grand — shatters in the sky, and two splinters find Kai. The boy who loved roses now loves only snowflakes, 'because they are perfect'; and one white winter day he ties his sled to a great white sledge, and is gone. Everyone says he is dead. Gerda does not believe everyone. She puts on her red shoes and starts walking north.

Why it's worth a listen

A goblin mirror shatters across the world, and one sliver lands in a boy's eye and one in his heart — turning everything he loves ugly and everything cold beautiful. Then the Snow Queen's sledge carries him north. What follows is one of the great rescue journeys: a girl with no magic at all, walking through seasons, palaces, and robber camps, armed with nothing but refusing to give up.

A question to keep

What can ordinary, stubborn love do against cleverness without kindness?

Based on the book by A tale from Denmark, published by Emma's Library original retelling

Chapters

  1. The Glass in the Eye and the Heart
  2. The Great White Sledge
  3. The River and the Flowered Garden
  4. Gold Coaches and Wild Robbers
  5. The Lapland Woman and the Finland Woman
  6. The Ice Palace and the Return Home