From: Ginny Kruse <gmkruse>
Date: Thu, 11 Jan 1996 18:30:00 -600

Thanks, Nina, for your comments about The Snow Queen (the parallels there are intrigue me greatly - maybe someone else will respond to this; I hope so) and to the way in which those images reflect the relationship between Fanny and her father. This helps me to consider Henry as being in process, just as Fanny is. It's easy to think of a child growing and changing, but it's unusual for a novel written for children to allow readers to see an adult who is also growing and changing. Adults do keep on learning and changing, and this can be scary to the children (and others) around them. Your insights also help me to think again about Protecting Marie as being about more than power and the lack of power, although I had aleady realized several other dimensions. For one thing, it's about moving from winter to spring - on more than one level, isnt' it? ... Ginny
(gmkruse at ccbc.soemadison.wisc.edu)
********************************************************************* Protecting Marie was one of the books discussed at the CCBC mock Newbery discussion in December. At that discussion, someone suggested a parallel between the story and "The Snow Queen" by Hans Christian Andersen, which Fanny and her father read every Christmas in "Protecting Marie". In the tale of "The Snow Queen", the Devil makes an evil mirror in which every reflected is ugly. This mirror breaks, and tiny slivers of it fly through the world. If a sliver gets caught in someone's eye, they see the world as ugly. If a sliver gets caught in someone's heart, their heart turns to ice. Gerta and Kay are friends, until one day, Kay gets a piece of the mirror caught in his heart. He is lured away to the north pole by the Snow Queen, and Gerta sets off to rescue him.

The parallel in this story to the characters of Fanny and Henry in
"Protecting Marie" is in Henry's bleak outlook on life, and Fanny's attempts to brighten it. I think especially of the scene in which they are talking about the bottles and vases Henry paints. Fanny says she always imagines the vessels full of wonderful things. Henry is surprised: he always thinks of them as empty and vacant, and figured that that's how everyone else saw them as well.

This parallel brings up what I think is the intriguing struggle in the story -a dual relationship between Fanny and Henry, in which Fanny both tries to "rescue" Henry (from himself), and at the same time to "protect" herself from him. Henkes portrays this struggle so realistically through Fanny's narrow perspective -- a perspective that is exploded at the end, when Fanny confesses to her father "Sometimes I'm afraid of you," and he replies, "Sometimes, I'm afraid of you too".

This book is so powerful to me, because I can feel at these points in the story that 'something happens', but I can't tell how Henkes made it happen! Does anyone else have this impression, or remember scenes in which 'something happens'?



Nina Lindsay Student--School of Library and Information Studies University of Wisconsin, Madison nlindsay at mail.soemadison.wisc.edu
Received on Thu 11 Jan 1996 06:30:00 PM CST