rushthatspeaks | Ice Crown, Andre Norton (365 Books, Day 185)

A couple of brief non-book-review things: firstly, that parsnip cake I posted the recipe for? If you can bear to, let some of it sit a couple of days after you make it. It was good when I first ate it, but today it was shocked-incoherent-noises good, I-only-have-this-reaction-to-chocolate-usually good, where-is-a-contest-I-can-enter-this-recipe-into-stat good. It is at this point one of the best non-chocolate desserts I have ever had. It was better than some chocolate desserts, and I say that as a person who considers chocolate a drug as opposed to a foodstuff. That said, I am decreasing the amount of anise next time, and have mentioned that in an edit to the recipe post, because the anise only builds as the cake sits. I love anise, and this amount worked well for me with the fresh cake, but it is definitely incredibly present as it ages and I suspect that ninety percent of everybody else does not want as much of it.

Secondly, I discovered today that one of Thrud's life ambitions is to someday have a fresco of Lorenzo de Medici inventing the internet.

In typical Renaissance style, with background figures including various philosophers and saints aloft upon an airship, the River Nile handing an elongated cat to the River Danube, a complex allegory of Venus and Mars looking towards and away from the new invention, a dance of the Four Cardinal Virtues, and Vulcan forging a series of tubes in the fires of Mount Etna.

Words fail me when I attempt to describe how much admiration this provokes in me. This has to happen someday. The world needs this fresco. NEEDS. We own a manga in which Pico della Mirandola is secretly a magical ninja, so clearly the universe is not inherently against it and we can damn well make this happen.

Anyway. Sorry. Book review.

Ice Crown is one of Andre Norton's Forerunner books, a loosely connected series of an indeterminate number of books set in the same universe (every time I turn around in the right kind of used bookstore I fall over a Forerunner book I've never heard of). The ancient and godlike civilization of Forerunners could do basically anything, but they vanished, and the current human civilization is attempting archaeological recovery amid wars, thievery, political intrigues and the usual dangers of interstellar travel. In this particular one, our heroine, Roane, is an archaeological assistant to her emotionally abusive uncle and cousin, who have gotten the rights to dig on a closed world-- one which a previous non-Forerunner civilization used as a setting for a planet-wide psychological experiment. The planet has been interdicted since the fall of the experimenters because no one knows what is going on with the experiment or how to stop it, but now there's the prospect of immense wealth and knowledge, so Roane's uncle's team are meant to get in, snoop around, and get out without ever interacting with any of the locals.

But after her initial, inevitable contact with the locals, Roane starts to realize that maybe there's a way out of the terrible life she has with her uncle and cousin. Unless, of course, the experiment is still causing trouble after all these years. Or other things go wrong.

I would not call this absolute top-echelon Norton, but it isn't bad, either. It's a good, solid, middle-of-the-road novel of the sort that used to be called 'science fantasy', notable primarily for having less of the truly inexplicable than many Norton books do, and less of a sense of deep time-- the planet is pseudo-medieval. Roane is an entertaining heroine but a kind I've seen a lot of in Norton, and her pain is told more than we feel it. The plot is well-engineered and does not do too much of the people going back and forth over the same stretch of country that Norton can resort to at her worst. Not very suspenseful, not very funny, but it doesn't do the annoying thing Norton also does a lot where the book ends about two pages before you would like it to.

This is honestly just a pleasant, mild book which will give you a moderately entertaining time without insulting your intelligence. There aren't enough of those in the world, really, so I approve.