Queen Elsa from “Frozen” as
Gemma Doyle from
“A Great and Terrible Beauty” by Libba Bray
About the Book:It’s 1895, and after the suicide of her mother, 16-year-old Gemma Doyle is shipped off from the life she knows in India to Spence, a proper boarding school in England. Lonely, guilt-ridden, and prone to visions of the future that have an uncomfortable habit of coming true, Gemma’s reception there is a chilly one. To make things worse, she’s been followed by a mysterious young Indian man, a man sent to watch her. But why? What is her destiny? And what will her entanglement with Spence’s most powerful girls—and their foray into the spiritual world—lead to?
About the Author:
Bray’s first job was in the publicity department of Penguin Putnam, followed by three years at Spier, an advertising agency specializing in book advertising.
Bray was encouraged to write a young adult novel by her husband, Barry Goldblatt, a children’s book agent and Ginee Seo, an editor at Simon & Schuster. Before this, using a pseudonym, she had written three books for 17th Street Press (a publisher of romances).
Her first novel, A Great and Terrible Beauty became a New York Times bestseller. In November 2006, a video promoting the book was a part of The Book Standard’s Teen Book Video Awards. She wrote two more books to finish the trilogy she had started with A Great and Terrible Beauty: Rebel Angels and The Sweet Far Thing.
Libba is friends with many young adult authors such as John Green and Maureen Johnson, and with fellow YA fantasy authors Holly Black and Cassandra Clare. Her blog can be read on https://web.archive.org/web/20101023044746/http://libba-bray.livejournal.com/.
Going Bovine was published by Delacorte in 2009 and won the annual Michael L. Printz Award from the American Library Association recognizing literary excellence in young adult literature. It is a dark comedy about a 16-year-old boy named Cameron who has mad cow disease and a 16-year-old dwarf named Gonzo whom he met in the hospital. Gonzo is a video gamer who thinks that everything is trying to kill him. Cameron has visitation from a punkish angel named Dulcie who has a propensity for spray-painting her wings. They are all on a mission to cure Cameron’s mad cow disease.
Beauty Queens, about a group of beauty pageant contestants whose plane crashes on an island, was published by Scholastic Press on May 24, 2011.
Bray’s novel, The Diviners, was published on September 18, 2012. It centers around Evie O’Neill, a seventeen-year-old with a special power who has been sent to live with her uncle in New York City in 1926. The sequel, Lair of Dreams, was released in August 2015 and the third book, Before The Devil Breaks You, was released in October 2017.[6] The fourth and final book in the series, The King of Crows, was released in February 2020.
About the Disney Character: Elsa is the perfect mythic character – magical and larger than life. Grateful her kingdom now accepts her, she works hard to be a good queen. But deep down she can’t help but wonder why she was born with powers.
Elsa of Arendelle appears in Frozen and its sequel Frozen II. She is loosely based on the fairytale “The Snow Queen” by Hans Christian Andersen. In the Disney film adaptation, she is introduced as a princess in the fictional Arendelle, heiress to the throne and the elder sister of Princess Anna. Elsa has the magical ability to create and manipulate ice and snow. Because of this, her parents hide her away at a young age. But after the death of her parents, she becomes the queen of Arendelle when she turns 18. During her coronation, she inadvertently sends Arendelle into an eternal winter. Throughout the film, she struggles first with controlling and concealing her abilities and then with liberating herself from her fears of unintentionally harming others, especially her younger sister.
Elsa runs away, planning to live freely with the use of her ice powers. But when her sister Anna comes to find her, she realizes that the love she has for her sister can help her take control of her ice powers. Her songs include “Let it Go”, “Into the Unknown” and “Show Yourself.”
