The futures and ultimate fates of the characters in The Snow Queen are profoundly changed by choices made in their own minds or hearts, as well as choices unexpectedly forced on them by things beyond their control.

There's more to me, more to the universe, than I suspected. Room for all the dreams I ever had, and all the nightmares...heroes in the gutters and in the mirror; saints in the frozen wasteland; fools and liars on the throne of wisdom, and hands reaching out in hunger that will never be filled.

I was thinking about what I wanted to write next, after my first novel, and had decided that I wanted to write a story with a lot of strong female characters in it.

The ecosystem of our world is a closed system: it would run out of gas, collapse of its own weight.

The contradictions are what make human behavior so maddening and yet so fascinating, all at the same time.

But our society does not grant nontraditional forms of intelligence equal recognition, no matter how much it would help us get along or truly enrich our lives.

Each time, storytellers clothed the naked body of the myth in their own traditions, so that listeners could relate more easily to its deeper meaning.