64 – Norway – Tarjei Vesaas – The Ice Palace – October 2018 (Score 5.90)

Spoiler Alert 1 – Don’t read the back cover until you have finished the book.

It’s a dark autumn evening in Norway. Siss, an 11 year old schoolgirl, is going to meet Unn, a new girl at the school that autumn. After Siss has visited Unn I have the feeling that Siss’s father may have been related to Unn’s unknown father (or possibly the same person).

The girls make tentative moves towards friendship. Umm asks Siss to visit her at home – not entirely successful.

Unn plays truant and goes exploring in the wintry frozen forest. I enjoyed the description of Unn’s journey to the Ice Palace, the ice built up from the frozen water in the waterfall from the lake above, and her looking for and finding an opening in the ice wall. She is frightened by the echo from her calls of “Hey!”

Unn is eventually completely lost in the twists and turns of the passages inside the ice. Finally she could move no more. Everyone in the village soon realises that something is wrong with Unn, but nobody thinks to visit her home.

Unn is clearly missing and a search starts, at the same time as the snow starts. Siss is unbelievably unhelpful. Would a child really behave like that when her new friend goes missing?

The search eventually reaches the Ice Palace but leads to nothing. The snow keeps coming as the snow peters out.

Spoiler Alert 2

I feel the story is rather obvious, especially if you have read Spoiler 1. That destroys the tension which should have been there for most of the rest of the book I could only give it a score of 5.