North Child (Usborne Modern Classics)

Product Information

Her curiosity overcomes her and she must travel east of the Sun and west of the Moon on an epic journey. This is a beguiling epic of magic, love, loss and betrayal based on the traditional fairytale "East of the Sun, West of the Moon". while Publishers Weekly saw that "Readers with a taste for fantasy and folklore will embrace Pattou's (Hero's Song) lushly rendered retelling of "East of the Sun and West of the Moon.

North Child is simply fantastic, and a wonderful book to both thrill and comfort… Brilliant for cold wintry nights or long lazy days. The quietly spoken Pattou, who must have been asked about this so many times, still enthuses about the effect it had on her as a child growing up in Chicago.I loved reading, especially fairy tales, and one day inside a battered book with a blue cover I discovered a tale that cast a spell on me. A North baby will be wild, a traveller and liable to meet an untimely end – however when Rose makes an unexpectedly early entrance into the world all Eugenia’s plans to have an East facing baby are thrown into disarray.

One of the many pleasures of reading North Child is that the world described, with its fascinating details of Norwegian and Inuit life, feels so very real.I loved going to EYF 2017 and mooching about as a punter; but last year also saw North Child taking a stand at a flock of yarn festivals, including Dornoch Fibre Fest, Highland Wool and Textiles Fair at Dingwall, Perth Festival of Yarn and Loch Ness Knit Fest . This amount includes seller specified domestic postage charges as well as applicable international postage, dispatch, and other fees. A childhood visit to Ireland gave her an experience of a very different type of home life when she spent a summer living with a family in Dublin. According to the birth-direction superstition held by Eugenia's family, the direction a woman faces when giving birth will affect the child's personality; each direction foretells a different personality, and Eugenia believes north is wild and uncontrollable.

It’s a story told by several different characters Rose (North Child), her father, her brother Neddy, White Bear and the Troll Queen. Yet even so, she’s particularly delighted that the reissue of North Child has sparked so many new ideas. Years before, Eugenia was told by a skjebne-soke (a fortune teller) that any north child she had would die crushed beneath an avalanche of ice and snow, reinforcing her desire to never have a pure northern child. While writing North Child, which is based on the Norwegian fairy tale “East of the Sun and West of the Moon”, Edith became an expert in mapmaking, seamanship, Scandinavian languages, Norse mythology and the Arctic, journeying by ship through the fjords of Norway.And something else kept popping up, although it had never really gone away; thanks to a request from Loch Ness Knit Fest, I began again to teach Waldorf doll-making. When her sister gets dangerously ill, and the family is in danger of losing its home, Rose makes a pact with a mysterious white bear. East (also known as North Child in the UK and Australia) is a 2003 novel by the author Edith Pattou. Its classic style has echoes of Beauty and the Beast, the Snow Queen and Narnia, with a tiny touch of Grimm Brothers’ darkness thrown in for good measure.

In trying to uncover the truth North Child, Rose, unwittingly lets him fall into the hands of the Troll Queen who wants the man hidden under the white fur to be her husband. Ideas would seem to come to her easily, she mentioned two or three others during our conversation, it’s the sifting process that takes time, she says.

It’s a relatively long book (circa 500 pages) but the descriptive story-telling and rich world-building pull you rapidly through. It’s a nice and beautiful story and but it’s a combined retold of the old fairy tales the Beauty and the Beast and The Snow Queen by Andersen. When I take North Child to knitting events, I bring with me a little notebook so that, in all the hustle and bustle of the show, I won’t forget the useful and helpful comments I get. Last year, my blog was seriously neglected in the whirlwind of making, teaching and selling; all I can say in my defence is, looking back through my year-planner, I genuinely don’t know how I did it all! The journey of writing North Child was a long and winding one which included gliding through fjords in Norway, delving into the treacherous beauty of the Arctic and becoming an expert on the intricacies of weaving and mapmaking.