Customer Reviews

The Palace of the Snow Queen: Winter Travels in Lapland

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If travel books are about making far away, different, and maybe even unbelievable landscapes accessible to those who will never journey to them, then this book has hit the mark. I found it truly engaging and felt every below zero day and snowy landscape that Sjoholm traveled through. The cold and the colors and the people of the north became alive to me in a way that surprised me given my own penchant for reading about and traveling to more equatorial climes. Fascinating! This book has a bit of everything, from the social to the political to the environmental. And why not? It's a complex landscape, as Sjoholm points out, and not at all the "wilderness" that so many have previously deemed it to be. The writing is vivid and lively, but it is also the exhaustive research that went into the storytelling that I am impressed with. The history of Lapland suddenly comes within reach of the present day because of the ways in which Sjoholm chose to tell her story. I would highly recommend the book to anyone who is thinking of traveling to northern Scandinavia, as well as to those who are not. I admire Sjoholm for doing the work and obviously being completely enthralled with the cold and darkness and people and animals; it surely couldn't have been an easy journey but readers will benefit from her efforts.

Sjoholm's book is an intriguing read - part travelogue, part history, and part social commentary about Lapland and its indigenous people, the Sami. Struggling to cope with the breakup of a long-term relationship and post-9/11 anxiety, she decides to travel to this region encompassing the areas of Norway, Sweden, and Finland above the Arctic Circle in the winter of 2001, and again in 2003 and 2004. At the center of her odyssey is the Icehotel, a 60-room hostelry constructed entirely of snow and ice on the shores of the Torne River in Jukkasjärvi, Sweden. The hotel, visited annually by thousands of people from around the world, reminds her of the ice palace in a beloved fairytale from her childhood, Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen." Over her three trips, Sjoholm explores the building as it is being built, spends the night there as a guest, and watches as it starts to shrink and drip and melt into the river. Through the eyes of the workers and artists involved in the project, she demonstrates the fascination of creating an object of beauty not intended to last. The Icehotel exemplifies the drive to promote winter tourism in the area, an effort, Sjoholm soon discovers, that is often at odds with the needs of the reindeer-herding Sami. Sjoholm gives them voice through her thoughtful, empathetic descriptions of their history, their culture, and their determination to survive as a people amidst the march of progress. In so doing, she effectively sensitizes the reader to the plight of indigenous people everywhere. Her lyrical descriptions of light make a forbidding place seem almost appealing, as when she views the sky one morning from a steamer off the Norwegian coast: "suddenly the light was no longer bone gray, but, in the east - blush pink and turquoise, then hot rose, mango orange, the sunrise churning into sunset, all in two hours, with the sun below the horizon, invisible below the iron-hard water." And she never lets the bitter cold stop her from taking advantage of the area's attractions, from riding a sleigh pulled by reindeer and eating fried reindeer meat in a smoky tent, to watching Macbeth sitting in an icy reproduction of London's Globe Theater. I hate being cold, but as I read the book, I could actually picture myself taking the trip she did. My reaction is testimony to Sjoholm's ability to engage readers from the outset and keep them with her until the last page of this fascinating adventure.

I purchased this book after an amazon.com recommendation popped up while I was purchasing a Lapland tour guide for an upcoming winter trip. In a way, the book was off-putting, not because of the cold (which I expect) but because the whole region sounds so dreary in the winter and because she makes my primary destination, Kiruna, sound like a dump of a mining town with little purpose other than serving as a jumping off point to other activities in the region. I started having second thoughts about taking the trip at all after reading this book. Still, her visits and description of the Ice Hotel in Jukkasjarvi were interesting and I learned a great deal of useful historical detail and information about the Sami culture and lifestyle that will make my trip more meaningful. Overall, the book fits nicely into my knowledge-gathering effort before this trip.

I discovered this book in the new section of the library and immediately was engaged by it. My mother's family was from Norway, so in recent years I've been reading about this part of the world. This particular book was not just about the Ice Hotel but also about the origins of the people in this part of the world and the struggles they have faced. I found the writer's adventures to be quite interesting and her own journey from unhappiness to curiosity, and ultimately to a special fondness for this area inspiring. I told my husband, upon completing the book, that I wanted to visit that area some winter, and he said, "feel free to e-mail me from there." Someday I hope to sleep in the Ice Hotel and experience what she did.

What a wonderful writer is Barbara Sjohelm! These are literary essays of the first order and fascinating travelogues to the present Far North and throughout history. A pleasure to read. This book deserves many readers!

Barbara Sjoholm tours the European countries of the Arctic Circle in the peak of darkness. She visits the Icehotel, sees MacBeth in an Ice theater, makes a dog sled trip, tours an iron mine and meets Santa Claus at his home. This book is much richer than these travelogs because Sjoholm shares her sensitivity to the indigenous people of the area, the Sami.

The narrative is symmetrical, starting and with Icehotel construction and an introduction to Sami lore and ending with the melting of the Icehotel and thoughts on the economic impact of toursim and the changing economy on the Sami.

Sjoholm has some interesting experiences with the cold. The temperatures are brutal. When its 23F in the ice hotel it may be -23 outside of it. The huts on the dogsled trip are of much colder and humans are more exposed in every way.

The author meets a lot of people, all are participants in various aspects of the life in this area. She adds their observations to her reading, primarily classic travel narratives, to paint a rounded portrait of life in this region.

I looked for other resouces on this area. There is some joiking on You Tube, but accessible contemporary works like this book are hard to find.

Lil' 50-something Babs from Seattle has written a tale of her time in "Lapland" which reveals both a humorless, hypocritical, condescending person's view on travel, and a weak spirit that comes from a spoiled victim mentality. Then to add to the "fun", Ms. Sjoholm throws in many uninformed details and historical references that are neither accurate nor documented. For example, she goes so far as to describe the working dogs that pull the tourist sleds as being "Shelties" or "Pug-like". In addition, her book has no footnotes to support statistical data she presents, such as a comparison of the destruction of Hiroshima, Japan to that of the Scandinavian city of Rovaniemi.

The author whines a lot in the book. At one point, she complains that she can't hear the information she needs to feel comfortable before starting out on a dog sledding adventure, but she doesn't speak up to ask for help. Later, she quits the trip less than half way through it, which was only three days! She even abandons a friend in doing so; someone who'd traveled a long distance and spent her own money to go with the author.

The negativity of this author is neither interesting nor deep, it's just self-indulgent. She took advantage of many people's time and hospitality to write this story, as she inadvertently reveals in her book, but she certainly did not repay it properly in a meaningful way.

If you want to read books about interesting and intrepid people, try "North to the Night" by Alvah Simon, "Otchum" by Nicholas Vanier, "Back of the Pack" by Don Bowers, or "Yukon Alone" by John Blazar for starters, but don't waste your cash on this one.