The Astronomer Who Met the North Wind Read Free Page A

child when I came to the end: the princess, alone, cold, and weeping, is saved by the North Wind’s son (who was a human—of course. And a prince—of course) and whisked away to her happily ever after. It was here that I hit on what about the story, about fairytales in general, bugged me: the rescue.
    A fairytale, in many ways, is a story of a protagonist getting into trouble over and over again, requiring magical intervention to make it to the ending. While exceptions definitely exist across all cultures, the “accepted” canon of fairytales (read: European) suggests protagonists are rarely active, and even when they are active, they are usually too inept or naive to manage their own welfare without help. This, to me, signified a fairytale. And it signified reams of possibilities to turn that reality on its head.
    What if the protagonist doesn’t need help? What if the danger the fairy godmother, the talking cat, the deus ex machina “here to save the day” is there to remove, isn’t a danger at all? Can a fairytale be a fairytale if the fairies aren’t needed?
    In
The Astronomer Who Met the North Wind
, people are out to save Minka from the danger of being a girl who wants to go into a STEM career, from the danger of being a child who thinks she knows what she wants to be when she grows up, from the danger of getting cold, or dirty, or discouraged while being female. To them, these are real dangers from which she needs protecting. And when it becomes clear she won’t listen to her human guardian, fairytale logic requires that the issue be escalated to a magical being, traditionally the vehicle to "save" the protagonist. But even the North Wind can’t dissuade her, because if Minka needs saving from anything, it’s from all the people (and now forces of weather) telling her she can’t know her own mind simply because of her youth and gender. And she’s well on her way to saving herself from them, too.
    But the bones of a fairytale are present: she still does go on adventure. She, like the princess of the original tale, strikes out on her own and learns something about herself. She seeks—and finds—something wondrous. She experiences magic. And in the end, she finds happiness.
    Ultimately, I wanted to adhere closely to a standard European fairytale structure, while challenging what seemed to me to be the genre’s central theme: that an individual isn’t capable of managing her own future without magical help. I wanted to make a statement, yes—about what it is to be a kid, especially a little girl, told by the world of adults that they don’t really know what they want to be when they grow up, particularly if that thing they want to be doesn’t mesh with gender norms—but I also wanted to make readers wonder, make them go back to their childhood favorites and ask themselves, “But is that really what the protagonist wanted? Did the fairy godmother get it right? What if she didn’t?”
    I hope those questions are asked. And I hope you enjoy the story.

A Chat with Kate Hall
    The Astronomer Who Met The North Wind
is a retelling of
The Princess Who Met The North Wind
by Wendy Eyton—a modern fairy tale with a very old fashioned “lesson.” What made you choose this specific fable to retell? Are there any particular themes in this story that you wanted to explore and subvert in your version?
    The Princess Who Met the North Wind
was my favorite tale as a kid, in part because the princess to me felt like a real human and in part because she went on a proper adventure, rather than falling asleep or waiting to be rescued. The ending always let me down, though, because after the adventure she still ended up getting rescued, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that, really, she didn’t want to be swept away by a total stranger after enduring so much taunting from said stranger’s father. It was this theme of the obligatory rescue (which, once I started thinking about it, seemed pervasive in most fairytales)