CM . . . . Volume XIII Number 22 . . . . June 22, 2007

 

Review by Reece Steinberg.

*** /4

Imaginative 12-year old Grace can't tell her parents about the strange dreams and visions that she has been having of the Ice World. They would just think she was letting her imagination run away with her. When she is drawn outside in a snow storm and summons the Ice Prince, she is unsure what to do. Should she accompany the prince back to his home, where, he tells her, her name is known throughout the land? His persistence that her presence is necessary to save both worlds from disaster scares her, but the images he shares are enticing. She hesitates to leave with a stranger –  and without being able to tell her parents!

 

     Split between the everyday world (during a typical Canadian winter) and the Ice World, this fantasy novel combines humour and adventure. Grace's blunt, matter-of-fact speech contrasts with the refined phrasing of the royalty of the Ice World in her believable response to discovering another world. Where the heroines of some fantasy novels may unthinkingly accept the existence of an alternate world, or accept an offer to join the world, Grace does not. She shows the street-smarts and the suspicion of strangers with which young readers will likely identify, as well as the reluctance to believe in something so unusual, even when the evidence is overwhelming. Throughout the book, Grace demonstrates creative and ingenious responses to her surroundings, including using an offered "wish" from the Ice Prince, Owyn, to wish him back to his own world. Grace is an example of a strong, young, female character who knows her own mind.

 

     Full of vivid descriptions of the icy surroundings, the writing will appeal to fantasy readers who like to visualize the settings, clothing and characters of the stories they read. A medieval tavern, the ice kingdom, and even the Canadian blizzard, inspired by the Montreal ice storms of 1998, give many opportunities for rich, detailed writing. At the same time, this book is quite action-oriented and begins with an enticing backstory of a runaway princess which will hook readers.

 

     A drawback of the book, which may not be so in the eyes of some readers, is the long dialogues by royalty in the Ice World. These pages filled with antiquated words and phrasing do set the mood of the book well but may be frustrating or distracting for readers. Grace, however, is also frustrated with this type of speech, and so these readers may be placated by her response.

 

     The cover art of this book, a wispy fairylike woman, is attractive, sufficiently mature looking, and will appeal to young female fantasy readers, for whom this book is intended.

 

Recommended.

 

 

Copyright © the Manitoba Library Association. Published by The Manitoba Library Association  ISSN 1201-9364 Hosted by the University of Manitoba.

Summer 2007

 

 

Volume 10, No. 3

From Small Things

Joyce Scharf's successful first novel began with bedtime stories and just kept growing

By Anne Chudobiak

 

 

When Scharf finally did put pen to paper, it was in the spirit of fun. "I just wanted a creative exercise," says the first-time author, who runs a home-based advertising agency with her husband.

 

Compared to the restrictions of writing ad copy, writing fiction seemed "totally indulgent. I remember sitting at my keyboard thinking, 'Okay, what am I going to write?' and not knowing." Then Scharf remembered the fantasy world that she'd already created for her eldest daughter. For those stories, she'd drawn inspiration from two main sources: the fairytales that she'd enjoyed as a child (Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm); and the beauty and destruction of Quebec's 1998 ice storm. "I just kind of put the two together," she says.

 

The result was an improvised series of adventures revolving around a fictional Grace, an otherwise normal girl who is summoned away from her nice home on a busy boulevard to save the distant Ice World from impending peril.

 

"There are pieces of my Grace in this Grace," says Scharf, "but she is an individual character."

 

Scharf based the house and garden in the story on her former home on West Broadway Street in Montreal West. The difficult part was creating the new world. "There's a lot of responsibility that goes along with that. It's almost anthropological." In the Ice World, there are no colours. "Black, white, clear, silver, that's it." Food is prepared without heat. Magic is rampant.

 

Scharf was surprised to realize what a wealth of material the bedtime stories presented in written form. "After about a hundred pages, I realized, 'This is not a creative exercise any more.'" She invited friends and family to weigh in on her work in progress, which reprised the characters from the imaginary world she'd created for her daughter: Ice Prince Owyn, Princess Farren and Percival the Dragon. "The response was overwhelmingly, 'Where's the rest?' And that's when I realized I was writing a book. And so then I just plunged into it."

 

After some mild interest and encouraging words from a New York publisher, the book received 25 rejections before being picked up by Saskatchewan's Thistledown Press. Editor R. P. MacIntyre worked with Scharf to "grow [the book up]" to appeal to nine- to 12-year-olds. "Because I'd written it for an eight-year-old market," Scharf states. "That's a very different kind of book. I just had to really rack my brain and take the story that I'd originally conceived and just make it more rounded, add more culture to it, give it more meaning."

 

She also made some changes to the book's structure. "The double narrative where you have [Ice Princess] Farren telling the story of the diamond heart as Grace is travelling [its] trail, that was brought out of working with the editor." The whole process taught Scharf that when writing for children, "there have got be highs and lows, and they have to happen fairly quickly. You want the right mix of tension and relief."

 

Scharf can rest assured that she got the mix right. The book, which came out last October, sold out its first printing by March. It's now in its second run and was recently released in the United States as well. "It really has been a dream come true," says Scharf, who enjoys meeting with her readers at schools, libraries, and book clubs. They know the book better than I do."

 

And their parents like it, too. They appreciate the book's theme of self-esteem and the message that good deeds will be rewarded. When the character Grace is called upon to help the Ice World, she is initially reluctant. She doesn't realize that in helping others, she herself will grow. When she finally agrees to travel to the Ice World, she isn't motivated by concern for its residents, but for her parents, who have fallen into a deep, impenetrable sleep after magical interference from unknown forces.

 

Although Scharf infuses her stories with moral lessons, she is careful not to talk down to her readers. "There's some pretty sophisticated language in there," she notes. More advanced readers who are already well-versed in 'castle speak' should enjoy vivid and precise descriptions like this: "Whistling gears announced the rising portcullis and the lowering drawbridge as Grace and her escort rode through the gatehouse and over the moat."

 

Not surprisingly, the book also reads well as a bedtime story, which is a particularly good option for younger - or less confident - readers, who aren't yet comfortable reading chapter books on their own. Scharf and her husband read the book aloud to their 10-year-old daughter Lily, who missed the stories the first time around.

 

Scharf hopes that boy readers will not be deterred by the fact that the main character is a girl. "There's enough boy stuff in it," she affirms, citing some of the book's funnier characters, including an out-of-shape dragon, and an obsolete order of knights who are desperate for a damsel in distress to save.

 

A lot of the book's humour - and there is a lot of humour - arises from playing with fairy-tale conventions. For most of the book, the down-to-earth heroine, who is charged with delivering an entire kingdom from danger, is wearing a puffy yellow jacket with black snow pants that are too babyish for her 12 years. She looks slightly ridiculous, even in her own world. Scharf says that when she gives readings she's pleased to see just how much the kids relate to the funnier parts.

 

"One of the questions that I always get is, 'And when is the movie coming out?'" she comments of her young readers. "Well, it's going to have to sell a whole lot of copies."

 

In the meantime she is at work on book two of what will eventually become a trilogy. "There's a lot of back story that I've created that's not here, that will come to fruition in the second book and then be resolved by the third."

 

She warns, though, that the next book will be quite a bit darker. "You see a very pristine side of the Ice World in this book. [The next one] will continue with Grace and she'll be six months older. And instead of it being winter when she is summoned, it'll be summer. So there's a whole dynamic there."

 

As with the ice storm, where beauty went hand in hand with destruction, so Scharf "will bring in that other side, the dark side," into the sequel. "Now I've really said too much," she notes with a grin.

 

Anne Chudobiak is a Montreal translator.

 

 

Young girls should always be careful of what they wish for. Whether they wish upon a star or down a wishing well, or, like Grace, out of a wintry window during Montreal’s famous ice storm, their wishes could come true. Then, like Grace, they could end up leaving a comfortable home and landing, willy-nilly, in a mystical kingdom of ice and snow where magic, mystery, and a royal family reign. This is what happens to Grace, “a slip of a girl . . . just shy of her twelfth birthday,” and the heroine of J. L. Scharf’s enchanting and myth-laden tale, Grace and the Ice Prince. It’s a story that has everything a reader of any age could wish for.

As an only child but with an invisible sister, Grace “simply did everything with her own special twist,” which is perhaps why her story has so many surprising twists and turns. She is haunted by a recurring dream and alien voices that tell her, “Make a wish . . . Wish for a prince, wish for a prince . . . Wish for the Ice Prince.” And when she does, her wish comes true and her adventures begin. Soon Ice Prince Owyn appears in her frozen backyard garden, gives her a magic mirror, tells her she may have anything she wants by wishing for it, and invites her to come with him to his Ice World, the Kingdom of Connacht where her presence is “desperately required.” Instead of going with him, she wishes him back to where he came from. But an ominous dream and the Prince’s forecast-“evil forces at work in mine world, ones that may have crossed over into thine”-forces her to reconsider and say in her loudest voice, “I must get to the Ice World! I wish to be in the Ice World!” And the magic works, for she is immediately transported to the Ice World, where she must make her way to the Prince’s castle, now shrouded in a permanent veil of darkness. While she struggles to get there, a parallel story unfolds about the Prince’s older sister, Princess Farren, who is striving as well to return to the castle. In pursuing their paths, one slogging across land and dressed in a “yellow jacket and jet-black pants [that] shouted in this world of white,” and the other riding atop a dragon named, Percival, they encounter wishes gone awry, Seekers and Stalkers, sister witches, one good, the other evil, Medieval knights, an ice-mouse, a Flyer, an Alice-in-Wonderland shrinking, and references to Guardians-and all of these wonders described in marvellously lyrical language that simply sings on the page.

When the two travellers get to their destination, Grace discovers why she was so “desperately required” in the Kingdom of Connacht. She also learns of her special relationship to some of the inhabitants. She also learns how to get back home, where time is frozen while she is away. She returns with “an Ice World’s version of a cellphone” and the knowledge that she only needs to “make a wish” to return again. Our wish is that she’ll get the call, make her wish and tell us all about her new adventures with Ice Prince Owyn, Ice Princess Farren, and her new friends, including her invisible sister.