I recently became aware that Snow Queen retellings don’t seem to garner the same attention that other fairy-tale retellings do. Given the popularity of the movie Frozen, the most famous Snow Queen retelling, I was startled to discover the apparent unpopularity of Snow Queen retellings more generally.
This discovery came about through a less-than-scientific methodology that is nonetheless probably very familiar to most true aficionados of science fiction and fantasy: scrolling through Amazon’s offerings in search of new books to read.
When I opened my Kindle app and researched “Cinderella Retelling,” over a thousand results appeared immediately. Scrolling down, I noticed that many of those retellings had hundreds and sometimes even thousands of positive reviews. Beauty and the Beast retellings appear to be even more popular, with even more results and more positive reviews!
I’m sure you can imagine my shock when the same search for Snow Queen retellings yielded a mere 284 results. Even more surprising was the drastic decrease in the numbers of reviews for most of the novels in that specific sub-genre. The most popular Snow Queen retellings only seem to have a few hundred reviews. I couldn’t find any with more than a thousand!
Why are Snow Queen retellings in such low demand when compared to the retellings of other fairy tales?
Thoughts?
Fairy truly yours,
Grace W. Wong
The Retellings Review (and Fairy Tales Too!) 
Hmmm… I’d say because the Snow Queen fairytale is far more fleshed out than other fairytales, which may make it harder for an author to make it original. Whereas Beauty and the Beast and Cinderella are both fairly short, simple, detail-free stories, mainly capturing a particular theme, the Snow Queen is a longer work with more intricacies. Definitely one to explore, though! I hope to someday write a Snow Queen retelling; thus far I’ve written both a Beauty and the Beast retelling and a Cinderella retelling.
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