History Literature / East

* BalefulPolymorph: [[spoiler:The white bear]], also known as Myk the troll captive, also known as [[spoiler:Charles the 150-year-old kidnapped French prince]].

* OutlivingOnesOffspring: Elise, already an IllGirl, dies at ''eight'', leaving Arne and Eugenia heartbroken.

* DiabolusExMachina: Plenty of hard trouble for one farming family,and none of their neighbors. Poor harvests, sick Sara, eviction... for the times, this would have been dangerously close to a [[AdultFear worst-case scenario]].

* AdultFear: Arne and Eugenia have to suffer through ''a lot''.
** Arne's business fails after the death of Eugenia's parents. The four children already born at that point begin to starve, and Arne becomes a farmer (not a very good one, either) and desperately struggles to feed them.
** Elise, already an IllGirl, dies at ''eight'', leaving Arne and Eugenia heartbroken.
** Rose is an extremely adventurous child, always wandering off and sometimes returning with injuries. Considering her mother views her as a replacement for Elise, it's not surprising she is mad with worry for Rose.
** After many poor harvests and the threat of eviction from the farm, Sara falls sick and is at death's door for many days. And then the white bear offers the family a possibility of Sara's recovery in exchange for Rose going with him.

* ForcedFromTheirHome: Rose's family learns they are bring evicted from their farm by their new landlord. Their kind neighbour offers to take them in, but they don't want to impose as he is extremely poor himself and there are seven of them. This crisis is one of the reasons Rose agrees to leave with the white bear. [[spoiler:As it turns out, it was the landlord's agent who planned to evict the family, while the landlord himself is a wonderful man who offers Rose's father a business partnership]]. The family ends up moving [[spoiler:to a house in Trondheim as the business prospers, and one of Rose's brothers decides to stay on the farm]].

''East'' by Edith Pattou (published as ''North Child'' in the UK and Australia) is a retelling of "Literature/EastOfTheSunAndWestOfTheMoon". Ebba (actually Nyamh) Rose, was first conceived as a replacement due to her deceased east-born older sister, Elise, but in a twist of fate ends with her being a north-born child. Her mother is upset, due to her family's beliefs about north-born people being wild and generally ill-behaved, not to mention the prophecy about any north-born child she has dying buried in snow and ice, and so decides to pretend that Rose was a east-born child in the hopes of averting it. However, nature wins out over nurture time and again, and Rose proves to be very much not like Elise.

* LastMinuteHookup: Downplayed; while not exactly in the "last minute", [[spoiler:Harald and Sara]] announce their engagement out of the blue rather late in the second half of the novel. Justified, as since neither is a [=POV=] character and their relationship has little impact on the plot, we don't get to see their interactions with each other.