The eye belongs to a boy, who explains that centuries ago he was sent from another world to vanquish the Snow Queen-but he failed, and the Queen imprisoned him. Ophelia peers through the keyhole and discovers an eye peering back at her. It is captioned, “The Marvelous Boy.” The mural conceals a small door. A peeling mural on the wall depicts a boy with a sword. One day she stumbles upon a tiny, drab room. Knowing no one in the cold city, and with nothing else to do, Ophelia explores the vast museum. Whittard is a world-renowned expert on swords, and he has taken on the project of organizing an exhibition in the city’s vast, cold museum: “Battle: The Greatest Exhibition of Swords in the History of the World.” A few days before Christmas, Ophelia and her sister Alice arrive in an eerie northern European city where it never stops snowing. A cold-hearted and manipulative queen persuades her husband to imprison his loyal companion, the “Marvelous Boy.” Centuries pass. The novel begins with a prologue set in the ancient past. Foxlee has won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the Best Debut Novel in the South-East Asia and Pacific region for her adult novel The Anatomy of Wings. Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy was hailed as a “well-wrought, poignant and original reworking” of Andersen’s tale by Kirkus Reviews.
A retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, the novel follows 11-year-old Ophelia Jane Worthington-Whittard as she attempts to rescue a boy trapped in a museum from its sinister curator Miss Kaminski. (Jan.Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy is a 2014 YA novel by Australian author Karen Foxlee, with illustrations by Yoko Tanaka. Illustrator’s agent: Steven Malk, Writers House. Author’s agent: Catherine Drayton, Inkwell Management. Certain elements, such as the identity of the Snow Queen, aren’t really surprises, but it’s in Foxlee’s evocation of the museum’s unsettling dangers, as well as Ophelia’s eventual willingness to reconcile what she knows in her mind with what she feels in her heart, that this story shines. Foxlee’s writing is elegant and accessible, with a pervading melancholy this is as much a story of loss as it is an adventure. Exploring the strange, icy, and nearly empty museum, Ophelia discovers the long-imprisoned Marvelous Boy, who recruits her to help him save the world from the Snow Queen she also turns up a cluster of deadly “misery birds” and a roomful of the ghosts of numerous girls. Ophelia’s family, shattered after her mother’s death, is visiting an unnamed snowy city so her father can curate an exhibition of swords.
In this appropriately frosty take on The Snow Queen, Foxlee (The Midnight Dress) introduces 11-year-old Ophelia Jane Worthington-Whittard, who’s asthmatic, pragmatic, curious, and braver than she realizes.
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