Book review: Travel Light

By Naomi Mitchison. We have owned this - or perhaps M has owned this - for time out of mind; and it is possible I've read it before; it is eerily familiar in parts. It is... whimsy; a jeu d'esprit; or so I say. Perhaps I missed anything deeper.

Halla as a baby is rescued from the court by her nurse-turned-bear, stays with the bears for a while, then as winter and hibernation approaches is transferred to the dragons, with whom she grows up. Slowly - later on, towards the end, it is revealed that the stoary has taken many generations and perhaps hundreds of years - men grow stronger and dragons more precarious; her protector is killed, and following a chat with the All-Father she heads off towards Midgard-aka-Byzantium, travelling light, forsaking the golden ornaments that her dragon-self loves. In Byzantium her ability to talk to animals allows her to predict the chariot races, earning money for her friends and an audience with the Emperor, and eventually the replacement of an Evil Governor that her friends had come to petition for. Returning, the result is less rosy than hoped, and she ends up heading north to Holmgard, where she abandons the world of men for the Valkyries.

So, a nice story nicely told of higher than usual literary quality. There are digs at heroes and their antics along the way, and men as a sex don't get a good book. Is there a point? Not a clearly defined one and perhaps it is all the better for that; the point is the look-n-feel.