Customer Reviews

The Trickster and the Troll

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I found this portrait of the immigrant experience sadly accurate, partly because I routinely work with immigrants to the United States and partly because of my own Native American heritage. Sneve's Europeans, who desperately want to thrive in the American Northwest, are trying hard to reject their native language and culture. In the process of carving out a new life, they destroy the indigenous Native Americans, who are being driven from their lands and their way of life, onto reservations.

Sneve's writing style is simple and easy to read. At the same time, her creative weaving of Native American and Norwegian traditions are thought provoking. And through the pronunciation guide at the back of the book, she perpetuates the languages her characters would have spoken.

In the end, there's a glimmer of hope that later generations will come to know their ancestors' languages and customs. And just maybe, we readers will stop to consider our heritage.

In her effort to combine two mythical figures from distant cultures, Sneve has allowed the moralizing of each to overpower what could be an interesting storyline. The detailed descriptions of both Norway and the Plains area of the western United States are intriguing. The cursury descriptions of the indigenous people (especially the Lakota) limit the readers' connection to the people thmeselves. The story seems to exist simply to give a moral value, not to present an interesting story about the two cultures.