Cold Spell

Pearce draws from Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” in her fourth and final story set in the werewolf-beset contemporary America of her previous fairy-tale retellings. Seventeen-year-old Ginny is eager to start a new life in New York City with her longtime best friend and not-so-longtime boyfriend, Kai, until a mysterious woman named Mora appears during a deadly snowstorm and lures Kai away. Following a hunch that Mora is actually the Snow Queen that Kai’s grandmother warned them about, Ginny sets out to rescue Kai. The characters Ginny meets (among them a werewolf tracker, an Irish Traveller known as the Princess of Kentucky, and a former beauty queen) help anchor this story in the larger world of Pearce’s earlier books. While “ocean girls” and the yellow-eyed Fenris will be familiar to devotees of Sisters Red, Sweetly, and Fathomless, newcomers might have difficulty getting up to speed in this complex world. The struggle to repair fractured relationships is, once again, central to Pearce’s story, and she ends her series with as happy an ending as is perhaps possible in the dark, unforgiving America she’s created. Ages 15–up. (Nov.)