about the book
The day her best friend stopped talking to her, it snowed. That morning, eleven-year-old Hazel ran outside in her pajamas to discover a silent white pristine world. As she stood on her stoop, her next-door neighbor, Jack, pelted her with a snow ball. She giggled and promised to get even as soon as she was dressed. How was she to know that his heart was going to be pierced by a shard of magical mirror?
Now he was gone. No, he didn’t die. With his heart iced, emotionally frozen and acting in a weird way, Jack just went off into the Minnesota woods on a sled pulled by wolves with an ghostly woman dressed all in white! But just because Jack rebuffed her doesn’t mean Hazel will abandon her friend. So she follows, determined to rescue him.
But this forest is enchanted, filled with twisted fairy-tale characters. All her life, Hazel has been a dreamer, one whose mind is filled with marvelous images. But not like this! There is a child ensnared in the body of a bird and kids imprisoned in flowers! Hazel even has a strange encounter with Minnesota Twins All-Star catcher Joe Mauer!
Can Hazel make her way through this weird white world and rescue Jack from the Snow Queen? One thing is certain, there is no breadcrumb path to lead her back home—and all fairy tales don’t end with “happily ever after!”
about the author
Anne Ursu grew up in Minneapolis, and even though she has moved to several other places, Minnesota has always been home.
She remembers freezing waits for the bus and moon boots crunching on snow. “When you’re a kid and you look out the window and it’s snowing and that seems so magical and the world just becomes something else, something other. Everything is quiet, and it feels like it’s almost your kingdom to go out and conquer.”
To Anne, Minneapolis was “the perfect place for the Snow Queen to drop by for a visit.” So that is why she chose it for the setting for her book Breadcrumbs. She wove in her own childhood memories: the character Jack sleds on Anne’s favorite hill and the heroine’s new school, Lovelace Elementary, is where Anne’s brother went.
The majority of Anne’s writing has been for adults but she also wrote the Cronus Chronicles for younger readers. Besides working on novels, she writes articles for several periodicals and teaches classes in Hamline University’s Writing for Children master’s program.
Anne lives in Minneapolis with her son and cats, and has always been an avid Twins baseball fan. She even created www.bat-girl.com where she adopted the persona of Batgirl. Though retired now from the blog, you might still find her as TwinsBatgirl using Twitter.
Sources:
Author website
Author/book review : NPR
Author interview : The Reading Zone
Author interview : Bildungsroman
Author biography : Wikipedia
Also by Anne Ursu:
The Real Boy. Walden Pond Press. 2013.
The Immortal Fire (Cronus Chronicles, Book 3). Atheneum Books for Young Readers. 2009.
The Siren Song (Cronus Chronicles, Book 2). Atheneum Books for Young Readers. 2007.
The Shadow Thieves (Cronus Chronicles, Book 1). Atheneum Books for Young Readers. 2006.
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