But the real heart and soul of Rose’s family relationships is her connection with her brother, Neddy. Same goes for her mother, who is hard to swallow sometimes, what with the way her obsessions (oops! I mean superstitions) regulate the whole family’s life, from little household oddities about sweeping and sneezing, to the cardinal direction the mother is facing when she gives birth to her children (hence the title of the book, as well as the basis of her slightly forced relationship with Rose).
We would know that their relationship is special just from observing them together. One of the great achievements of this book, though, is that even though her father tells us that Rose is his most special child, it’s really just something nice to hear. It is clear from the earliest that Rose holds a special place in her father’s heart, and that her relationship with her mother is a little complicated. Rose is the spunky, fidgety, inquisitive youngest daughter in her family, led by her beloved map-maker father and her tremendously superstitious mother. I’ll talk about a few of them here, but truly I can’t recommend enough that you go out and grab a copy of EAST wherever you can get it and fall into this absorbing, whimsical story. Her relationships in particular illustrate this. I loved the way the author described her restlessness, curiosity, and compassion. Rose herself is a breath of fresh air as a main character. This book alternates between several narrators–Rose, her father, her brother, Neddy, the bear, and the Troll Queen–and all of them moved me in one way or another (even the Troll Queen, with her crazy obsession, was kind of sad and pathetic in a heartbreaking way). It was a lovely, engaging, magical, poetic retelling of the “East of the Sun, West of the Moon” story, and even though I was not familiar with this tale before, I’m not sure that I could imagine a version that I would enjoy more.
In solving that mystery, she loses her heart, discovers her purpose, and realizes her travels have only just begun.Īs familiar and moving as “Beauty and the Beast” and yet as fresh and original as only the best fantasy can be, East is a novel retelling of the classic tale “East of the Sun, West of the Moon,” a sweeping romantic epic in the tradition of Robin McKinley and Gail Carson Levine.ĮAST has been on my TBR pile for a long time, and now that I’ve finally gotten around to reading it, I’m a little mad at myself for taking so long to pick it up.
The bear takes Rose to a distant castle, where each night she is confronted with a mystery. So when an enormous white bear mysteriously shows up and asks her to come away with him-in exchange for health and prosperity for her ailing family-she readily agrees. Summary: Rose has always felt out of place in her family, a wanderer in a bunch of homebodies. Click on the book cover for this title's Goodreads page!
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