Richard Grant is one of my favorite authors, if one of the least prolific.  Not to be confused with British actor Richard E. Grant, Maine author Richard Grant has written a mere eight books in his 25 year-long career.  But believe me, he makes each book count.

It's trite to call something "a modern fairy tale," and even more trite to try and write one.  Particularly now that the sub-sub-genre of Urban Fantasy has gained so much traction in the marketplace.  But that doesn't make In The Land of Winter any less amazing.

Part of the trick of the book is that the realization steals over you slowly.  Grant drops a few hints here and there, but it's not until you're in the middle of the book that you realize what an amazing work it really is.  Seen from one perspective, this is an old-school fairy tale, complete with witches, fairies, wild Indians, and trolls - but with everything knocked just a little bit off-kilter.  Seen from another perspective, this is a thoroughly modern story of religious discrimination in small-town America, and the world's general propensity for inflexibility and intolerance towards the Other.

Amazing, right?  Even more amazing still is that you don't really care about all that big stuff.  It's all about the story and the characters.  The framing device and Bigger Issues mean nothing without the joy in storytelling, and Grant has that in spades.

The only bad thing I can say about In The Land of Winter is that it may not have aged completely well.  It was written in 1997, at the height of the ritual cult scare.  It's easy to forget those days in the early to mid-1990s when Satanist cults were all the rage, before the phenomenon of "recovered memories" was thoroughly debunked.  The Concerned Parents were up in arms against anything they dubbed "satanic," and the practice of Wicca fell smack in the middle of that category.

When most people think of Wicca today, they're more likely to think of Willow than of Satanic rites and baby-killing.  These days, Wicca is an officially sanctioned religion.  Heck, even the U.S. Military has sanctioned Wicca, recently allowing the Wiccan religious symbol of the pentacle to be added to the list of emblems approved for usage on soldiers' tombstones.  

Maybe the book should be rewritten with "gay adoptive parents" instead of "a single Wiccan mother."  But no matter; the story of poor beleaguered Pippa who loses her daughter to the State and the manufactured outrage of her town's Concerned Parents is essentially ageless.

This is also a thoroughly feminist fairytale.  The princess who needs rescuing is not a swooning young woman, but an eight year-old girl.  (And she does a pretty good job of sticking up for herself even so.)  The prince, although instrumental in her rescue, is more of an elfin aide.  The witch is the hero; her chief antagonist is the evil stepmother.  And the werewolf is a stooped and elderly old man.  

Grant has a wonderful way of evoking the poignancy of a time and place.  This story, of the tumultuous events in the winter of a small Maine town, is no exception.