After a week in which every day felt like Friday, I welcomed the chance to read under a favorite quilt with a hot cup of tea next to me today (with bread-baking and soup-making mixed in). As the snow fell outdoors, I was enthralled with Icefall by Matthew J. Kirby indoors. My teaching partner read it the other day. She brought it to work, telling me she would rather be home reading it! We often do that: bring the book we wish we were reading, all the while knowing we will not be able to read it at school. We must get comfort in having it nearby. She was not certain I would enjoy the suspenseful adventure as much as she did. I have.
Solveig is the middle daughter of the king and the story's narrator. Along with her brother Harald, heir to the throne, and her sister Asa, stunningly beautiful and most-noticed by their father, she is literally stuck in a rocky, ice-locked fjord with a glacier flowing above them. Protected by three men assigned by the king and later joined by the king's berserkers (all in bear or wolf skins), Solveig senses imminent danger, learns to trust Alric, the king's skald, and finds an unlikely companion in Hake, the berserker leader. Something is amiss in their icy steading, yet Solveig remains stalwart in her defense of what she believes is right.
Before I go to bed on this cold Minnesota evening, I must finish the story that has so captured my attention.
sounds as if it is one of the books that transports the reader to another time and place so convincingly that it even changes the reader's speech pattern and vocabulary.
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