Customer Reviews

Ice Land: A Novel

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I was ready to like this book since I am a big fan of Icelandic Sagas. It did not disappoint. Betsy Tobin's language is stark and simple, much like the plain, unfancy tone of the Sagas. There are a few missed notes but overall the effect is consistent and well-crafted. All the action takes place in the present tense, shifting to past tense only to refer to events that occurred in the past (duh.) The narrative voice switches from first-person to third-person from chapter to chapter. Each chapter is headed by the name of the character who is the focus of that chapter. Freya (the Norse goddess of love) is the first-person narrator. She is the one actually telling the story. Fulla is a teenage girl just emerging into womanhood. The story bounces back and forth between these two, and then there is a dismal geological interruption by the Norns (the Norse equivalent of the Fates.) These tidbits from the Norns pop up occasionally throughout the book, and in them the narrative voice is that of the Norns; this is the only time when it could be understood that Freya is not narrating. Dvalin the dwarf and Berling his brother are the subjects of a couple of chapters, and Vili the young man gets a chapter of his own later.

The setting is Iceland, around the year 1000 A.D. King Olaf of Norway is trying to annex Iceland (whose people pride themselves on their independence.) Christianity is making inroads and causing friction with the traditions of farmers who have grown up worshiping Thor and Odin. This novel's Iceland is more magical than the Iceland of the Sagas, but more prosaic than the picture one usually gets from Norse mythology. The geography is mysterious; it makes sense and yet at the same time, it doesn't. Instead of placing Asgard somewhere in the heavens, Betsy Tobin places it on earth. The abode of the gods is remote and hard to find, but you can get there if you know the route. Same goes for the dwarves and the giants. A helpful afterword from the author explains some of the mythological sources that inspired the story, and the liberties she took while writing the novel.

Though set against a mythical backdrop, there is very little magic aside from Freya's feathered cloak that turns her into a bird, and the vague unidentified power of the Brisingamen (the dwarf-made necklace that Freya spends half of the book trying to acquire.) Oh yes, and the Norns weaving the fate of the world at their loom.

It's a great story, full of power and beauty and a sort of bittersweet sentiment for these old long-dead myths. The doom of the gods is prophesied in the "Voluspa" (and most of us have heard of the legend of Ragnarok.) It is due to a foreboding that the end of her world is approaching that Freya sets out to acquire the Brisingamen. There's love, and adventure, and philosophizing. This book satisfies on every level, but it isn't quite perfect enough for 5 stars. Let's call it a solid four and a half.

In 1000 AD in Iceland, Freya the Aesir goddess of love seeks a gold necklace created by the Brising dwarves that the Fates warn her can change history. At seemingly the same time sixteen year old orphan Fulla has fallen in love with Vili, whose father killed her father. Meanwhile also apparently at the identical moments, the Norns observe increasingly dangerous volcanic activity especially by Hekla that looks ready to explode.

Freya works a deal with the dwarves for the necklace in exchange for escorting their leader Dvalin in a quest to cure his sister's infertility. She actually obtains the necklace, but Odin steals it from her. Odin uses the necklace to extort Freya into kidnapping Fulla, who is his daughter; Fulla's human family accepts Vili into their clan as her husband. Hekla erupts destroying much of the surrounding area, but also enables Freya to regain the necklace and rescue Dvalin.

This is an exciting Nordic historical romantic fantasy that use Norse mythology to tell the tale of forbidden loves at a time when Christianity has come to the island. Although the two major subplots can prove difficult at times to follow as perspective rotates frequently, sub-genre fans will relish Betsy Tobin's terrific tale of love conquers all even a legendary God.

Harriet Klausner

"This book is my love letter to Iceland and its people," writes Betsy Tobin in her afterword to _Ice Land_. And so it is. Tobin is at her best when describing the landscape of Iceland:

"The day we met, I had flown deep into the central highlands, seeking a spot where I could be alone. I found it on a high desert plateau, where a hidden spring had forced its way up through the lava shield, forming an oasis. The water was a brilliant cobalt blue. It spread like fingers across the plateau, and all around it lay a bed of thick, luminous green moss."

Tobin's love of Iceland's unusual landscape is clear. Though her prose is spare compared to some, she brings the land's beauties to life in the reader's mind.

Tobin's minimalist style continues throughout _Ice Land_, with mixed results. Sometimes the prose style works with the story, its simplicity emphasizing the raw forces of nature and the rugged lives of the people who live in the shadow of the volcano Hekla. Sometimes the writing works against the story, though, skimming over events that could be interesting to read, and describing settings (especially man-made settings) so thinly that I had trouble visualizing what these places looked like.

What really bogged me down, though, was _Ice Land_'s lack of forward momentum. There's clearly a plot. The goddess Freya is trying to save Iceland from cataclysm by bargaining for the dwarves' necklace Brisingamen, and the mortal girl Fulla is searching for love and a husband. Yet the tension never feels like it's being ratcheted up. The characters wander from place to place, and in each place, have arguments. Their level of anxiety doesn't seem to rise from one incident to the next. It just doesn't feel like it's going anywhere, even though I know that eventually it must.

I'm also not sold on the central love story. The back cover promises "star-crossed lovers," but I'm seeing bratty teenagers rather than epic soulmates. It takes amazing writing to make me like a story where characters fall in love after just a few brief meetings. It also takes amazing writing to make me like a couple who bickers all the time. Tobin adds the two together, and so getting me on board becomes nearly impossible. Fulla and her star-crossed love meet only a few times, fighting like cats and dogs on most of these occasions, before becoming obsessed enough to ruin lives over their forbidden desire. It doesn't feel like true love to me. It feels like a selfish whim. I don't like these two characters, and that's representative of _Ice Land_ as a whole. I just don't like any of the characters much, and maybe that's why I can't get into the book.

For a novel to hook me, it has to have great characters, a compelling plot, or (ideally) both. _Ice Land_ has an interesting writing style and a beautiful setting, but fails to make me care about the characters or keep me turning pages.

Let's be clear about one thing right away: Betsy Tobin's novel, ICE LAND is a children's book, on the order of Kipling's KIM, Wyeth's THE SCOTTISH CHIEFS or Burroughs's THE CHESSMEN OF MARS or THUVIA MAID OF MARS. Don't regard Betsy Tobin as competition for Herman Hesse or Thomas Mann and you will do well.

Buy this book as a birthday gift for a teenage granddaughter or nephew. Be assured that she or he is very likely to come out of a first reading with an elementary knowledge of Icelandic geology, history, religions and myths. The author deliberately humanizes a god like Odin and shows a bit of divine spark in his half human daughter Fulla. The Aesir race of Icelandic gods is just a bunch of humans written larger than the island's Dwarves and much larger than the island's Giants. Miscegenation among all three races bothers no one. And marriage is the ideal, even when not entirely voluntary on the part of the engaged couple.

Religion is important to Icelanders. Fulla's putative grandfather Hogni says that he sailed from Norway to Iceland 30 years ago "to be free" of Christians. Young Vili, Fulla's would be boyfriend, despite the fact that his father slew the human she thought her father, questions both the old gods and the new Jehovah. And Freya and some of the other gods fear the old prophecy repeated by the Norn Skuld that the great gods will outlive their usefulness and disappear. And what is heaven? Is it dwarves and other tribes that create hell among us? "Perhaps heaven is a place defined by man's absence."

Some scholars see medieval Iceland as supplying some of the liberty of conscience and small government ideals embedded in the US Constitution. And you get a three-dimensional sense of these values in ICE LAND. The old gods were fated to go. And Christian missionaries from Norway made sure they went sooner rather than later. Nonetheless Iceland managed a compromise which begat several centuries of religious peace when Odin, Freya, Loki, Bragi and all the rest could be legally worshipped in the privacy of one's home. Too bad England's Henry VIII and successors didn't try that compromise at Reformation time. Hundreds of beheadings and burnings could have been avoided.

Don't ask more of ICE LAND than its author intended. And you will find it a light, informative, lucid read. -OOO-

This is what I would call an extremely minimal retelling of a massive story. The great sagas of Iceland, Greenland & the Norse are huge, encompassing volumes of mythology & lore, passed down from generation to generation & recorded hundreds of years after; the Sagas, the poetic & prose eddas the result. I say this to explain that, if you're a student or fan of Norse mythology (as I am), this novel will leave you wanting.

The story is told, for the most part, by Freya, a goddess of Asgard, one of the nine levels or worlds of Norse mythology, the world of the gods. Freya tells her story in first person. Her story follows, very loosely, Freya's mythical pursuit & ownership of a beautiful & powerful necklace. This all connects to the other characters in the book. In relation to mythology, Freya is portrayed with little regard for the Norse character, aside from the necklace & her cloak of feathers, which gave her the ability to fly.
A couple of gods of Asgard make cameo apperances in the novel; Odin the powerful, Loki the trickster (though you wouldn't know them as such here).

Interspersed throughout the book are short, one page, sometimes one paragraph, statements from the Norns (if you don't know mythology, this means nothing as the identity of the Norns is never stated in the novel). The Norns are 'the spinners', the deciders of fate, the three women who weave the threads of life at the base of Yggdrasil (the tree of life upon which all nine worlds of Norse mythology exist; yet none of this is in the book because Tobin wrote Iceland as "Yggdrasil" of reality and not actually seperated upon a tree; so then who are the Norns?) where they also care for the roots of the tree to protect them from rot.

At the center of the tale is Iceland's great (still active) volcano, Hekla. This is confusing as the book supposedly takes place at the beginning of the 11th century (1000 AD), when Christianity was beginning its crushing takeover of "pagan" Iceland, but Hekla is preparing to erupt, which didn't take place until 1104. Historical fiction this is & I can forgive small movement of dates but when the centerpiece of the story is transferred 100 years, as was Hekla or the emergence of Christianity in Scandinavia, it just doesn't work. But, I love Norse history, so perhaps I nitpick...

There is also the tale of ordinary Icelandic folk (those of Midgard, the world of humans on Yggdrasil). None of these characters, whose stories are told in third person (I assume Freya tells the story, but I can't be sure), truly come alive in the writing. None of the story really makes any sense against the backdrop of what is supposed to be Norse mythology. Some of the characters come & go without resolution. Some of the characters are drawn as if we should judge them, be wary, question their intentions, but they don't play out as anything but another in the tale; then they're gone.

So, why the title of my review? The characters are all too easily connected in one way or another, including the few gods we meet, but none of it really matters in the end when the story drops with no true understanding of why it was written to begin with. Basically, if you are looking for a decent diversion, you could do far worse. If you are a fan of Norse mythology, consider; you may become irritated.

If you are interested in the "Christianization" of Iceland in a newer novel (in other words if you want something different than the 'saga','prose' or 'poetic'), I'd recommend the novel Kari's Saga; the story is not fantastic (but it is good), but the portrayal of Icelandic law (the first successful quasi-democratic governance in human history) & the historical details of invading Christianity (which was brutal & very, well..., 'un-Christian') is exceptional.

Good luck!

I loved this book. It's a well written and interesting story of great quests, of forbidden love, of magic, of medieval Iceland, and of people who don't even know how lonely they are until they find each other. I found this enjoyable and easy to read, and the story was entertaining, moving, and satisfying.

Ice Land tells a few intertwining stories from different points of view, all of which eventually end up as one story, taking place in Iceland in AD 1000, when the people and the culture of the land were in the middle of a great change. The heroine and narrator is the Norse g-ddess Freya, who goes on a quest for a magical necklace that she hopes will allow her to save her people and her land from the danger she feels is coming. Fulla is a beautiful young girl whose grandfather is desperate to arrange an advantageous marriage for her, although she longs to marry for love. Dvalin is trying to help his sister--even though doing what she asks of him means a perilous journey to face what he dreads--and trying to find peace and enjoyment in the life he has half chosen and half been forced into. Meanwhile, Mount Hekla in southern Iceland is rumbling...

The alternative points of view did jar me at first, especially because one of them, Freya's, is a first person narration, while the others are the odd combination of third person and present tense. But I quickly got used to it, and it was no problem. The writing is very good and clear and the dialogue is modern and understandable without being so undeniably current that it takes you out of the story. There are interesting and sympathetic characters with depth, good characterization, and realistic and understandable motivations. The setting of the scene is done well; the story truly felt like it took place in the past and I could easily picture the Iceland in which these people lived.

Ice Land is a great and different take on a Norse myth, with much more depth, detail, passion, interest, and humanity than the surviving story (reading it made me get out a book of Norse mythology to compare). It's also a great look at life in medieval Iceland at a time when the old religion and Christianity were facing off, an exciting fantasy adventure story, and a very satisfying love story.

I picked up this book because I'd spent several months in Iceland and was fascinated both by the land and the people. I feel the book does give a strong sense of the land, but the people in the book are somewhat problematic, as other reviewers have noted. One of the most awkward things that can happen with reading a love story is thinking "these people probably shouldn't be together." I admit I found myself thinking that with both the parallel plots in the story. The actions of the characters were also not fully motivated and more than once I found that I simply didn't believe that they would have done the things I was reading. Finally, I would have thought that an ending dealing with the twilight of the Gods would have been a lot more exciting than the one in this book. I'm giving it three stars because it does have a real sense of atmosphere and there are interesting parts in it, but overall it doesn't really add up to something greater than the sum of its parts.

In Tobin's second novel, after Bone House, she takes on the world of Iceland in the year A.D. 1000, setting the stage with research details of Viking and medieval Iceland, combining it with a host of characters from Norse mythology. The main character, Freya - one of the Aesir (gods) - has her own problems to deal with in life and love, while many other characters, including Odin, an unusual dwarf, and a group of giants deal with their own subplots.

The voice and pacing are quite different from most books and will in some cases turn off the reader at first, the key is to stick with it, get used to it, and then sit back and enjoy the story. Ice Land is a well research novel about a time about some but not all is known, and Tobin has done a great job of filling in the details with her descriptive and colorful fiction.

Originally written on September 9th, 2009 ©Alex C. Telander.

Originally published in the Sacramento Book Review.

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This book is different, the person on the quest for the magical object is a Goddess.She is searching for a necklace that can change the course of history Her beloved people are headed to.Their religion is under attack from the rise & spread of Christainty, bringing war on its heels.
In this story, there is love between 2 people who's family threaten to tear them apart.The story is set in Iceland, a country rich in mythology & its own history. Iceland's tale is not as well known as the countries of England or Ireland. But their struggles were the same.
For those who love historical & mystical tales, this is another country with a rich conbination of both. Better than expected, I enjoyed learning about their rich heritage.

I don't know much about Iceland as a country and I know even less about it's myths and the myths of the Norse peoples. With that in mind, I loved this book. It is a modern remix of Nordic mythology. It had a touch of magical realism. I recommend it if you like Neil Gaiman (it was similar to American Gods and Stardust), mythology or fantasy.