Reviewing Catherine Fisher's "Snow-Walker": Conclusion

I liked a lot of things about the Snow-Walker trilogy, and there were even more factors that I wanted to like. The concept is intriguing, but in execution the writing commits a major storytelling mistake: it tells more than shows. 

Reviewing "The Soul Thieves" - Book 3 of The Snow-Walker Trilogy

The first two books of The Snow-Walker Trilogy create a gradual climb in tension, leading to the ultimate showdown of Gudrun and Kari. When Gudrun puts a sleeping spell on the kingdom and steals the soul of their king’s fiancée, Kari sees it is a ploy to get him to come to her. Jessa, Kari and his warrior-guardian Brochael, Hakon (who is now training to be a warrior), and the poet Skapti set out into the forbidden north where the Snow Walkers live. 

Reviewing "The Empty Hand" - Book 2 of The Snow-Walker Trilogy

The Empty Hand retells Beowulf, which perhaps contributes to its being my favorite installment of the trilogy. In this novel, Gudrun has been banished from the kingdom, intent on having her revenge. She sends a magical, phantom-beast after her son Kari, eating anything and anyone who stands in its way. A secondary plotline follows Jessa as she tries to hunt down a thief, uncovering a treasonous plot in the process. Her cousin Thorkil is mentioned, but not seen again—perhaps because he was so boring in the first book he needed to be replaced. 

Review of "The Snow-Walker's Son" - Book 1 of The Snow-Walker Trilogy

In the first book of the Snow-Walker Trilogy, Catherine Fisher basically retells Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen in a Viking fantasy world. (But no, if you’re a rabid fan of Frozen you will not necessarily like this book, even if both stories are based off the same source material.)

The kingdom has been taken over by Gudrun, an evil sorceress of unknown origin, with white hair and icy eyes. Cousins Jessa and Thorkil are brought to the queen’s stronghold in order to sentence them to banishment. Why she doesn’t kill them, or has to bring them to be banished by her in person, I don’t know. Anyway, she banishes them not just into the wilderness, but to an abandoned castle where the queen’s own son (rumored to be a monster) has been held captive for over a dozen years. 

Reviewing Catherine Fisher's "Snow-Walker": Introduction

On a whim when visiting the library, I went to the YA section and picked out a book by Catherine Fisher. Years ago I had read her novel Incarceron and its sequel Sapphique, which I remember as being vivid speculative fiction in a steampunk-prison alternate universe. My library has several more of her books that for one reason or another I haven’t gotten around to reading...until now.  

Picking out a book is hard on two sides of the spectrum. On the shallow end, there seem to be so few books out there that are actually excellent; after a string of disappointments one begins to wonder if they’ve possibly read everything worth reading. On the deep end, there are so many books, all of them with the potential to be excellent—after all, you can’t judge a book by its cover, right?