Reading: Travel Light
Nov. 1st, 2019 08:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartI always love finding recommendations for new books in the books I'm reading, and I was intrigued enough by the mentions of Naomi Mitchison's Travel Light in Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone's This is How You Lose the Time War to seek out a copy. I wasn't completely unfamiliar with Mitchison's work; I remembered reading Memoirs of a Spacewoman in my teens, and I think from the description in the introduction to my copy of Travel Light that I also read The Conquered at least, but I hadn't thought of her in a long time.
Travel Light is an absolute delight. It's the story of Halla, daughter of a king in a land which owes a great deal to Norse mythology. When her stepmother decrees that the child should be got rid of, Halla is saved by her nurse, who turns herself into a bear and steals away with the child. Halla is brought up first by bears and then, when the bears go into hibernation, by dragons, before leaving her Norse home to travel to Micklegard (aka Constantinople). It's a short book, but the writing is beautiful, with a wonderful sly humour, and although it uses the structure of a traditional fairy-tale or quest narrative it's constantly subverting the conventions of the genre in a way that I was utterly charmed by.
Travel Light is an absolute delight. It's the story of Halla, daughter of a king in a land which owes a great deal to Norse mythology. When her stepmother decrees that the child should be got rid of, Halla is saved by her nurse, who turns herself into a bear and steals away with the child. Halla is brought up first by bears and then, when the bears go into hibernation, by dragons, before leaving her Norse home to travel to Micklegard (aka Constantinople). It's a short book, but the writing is beautiful, with a wonderful sly humour, and although it uses the structure of a traditional fairy-tale or quest narrative it's constantly subverting the conventions of the genre in a way that I was utterly charmed by.
