[The Snow Queen] has a complicated plot, whose complications—unfortunately for the success of the novel—unfold so deliberately that its final shape is clear only in retrospect. Moon Dawntreader, the protagonist, is a young woman born to fisherfolk of the Summer people. She is in love with her cousin, Sparks. Both were conceived at the last Festival in Carbuncle. Moon, though she does not know it, is the clone of Arienrhod, the Snow Queen of the title, who rules the Winter stage of Tiamat and has prolonged her life through the slaughter of the gentle, immortal Mers and now hopes to prolong her reign, even after her death in the ritual that marks the coming of summer, by making her clone the Summer Queen…. The novel aims at the inevitability of myth, but the author … does not seem to appreciate that the myth must be established early...