Travel Light

[starlady]

Mitchison, Naomi. Travel Light. Northampton, MA: Peapod Classics, 2005. [1952]

I have something of a brain-crush on rushthatspeaks - I have never gone wrong reading something out of one of rush's reviews, and Naomi Mitchison is no different. Travel Light caught my eye in the dealers' room at WisCon and I actually paid for it with a check, how 20thC, and it is appropriately charming and timeless.

Travel Light is the story of Halla, who is born a princess but whose father the king is quite happy to put her out when his new queen says so and is rescued by her nurse from Finmark, who transforms into a bear and takes the infant Halla to live in the woods. Halla is eventually raised by dragons and finds herself under the eye of the All-Father, whose commandment to wanderers is to travel light - and so she does, through time and space and history and myth and legend. I am not sure that I have the words to describe exactly the nature of Mitchison's magic, but she has a very good grasp on the ways in which past habits of thought by people were different (and I say this as a historian), and she has a real gift for the telling description, the right phrase. In the end nothing quite works out as I might have expected, but everything works out in a very sensible way.

I really dislike when short books garner long reviews, and so this is a short post. Suffice it to say that it is as charming and lovely as the Small Beer Press guy swore to me that it was as I wrote out my check, and suffice it to say that I think most people who like fantasy would like this book, and suffice it to say that I will be very much reading more Naomi Mitchison.

Comments

[oyceter]

I think I have a copy of her Corn King and Spring Queen that I could dig up if you're interested?

[starlady]

Oo, yes!

[oursin]

Mitchison is amazing - she also wrote great science fiction. We had a brilliant panel on her at Eastercon (50 years since her Memoirs of a Spacewoman was published this year).

[starlady]

Yeah, my basic strategy is to just sort of read whatever I can find, but I think that one is fairly readily available.

[cofax7]

I read that recently too! I enjoyed it a great deal, although I felt like, hmm, like I was expecting something other than I got. Which I think says more about me, actually.

[starlady]

Yeah, it was--never quite what I was expecting, either. But I liked it! And I like when books don't do what I was expecting.

[rushthatspeaks]

I love Naomi Mitchison so much. Travel Light-- I mean, I know it's from 1952, but if someone had tried to tell me 1982, or 2002, or this year-- all plausible. For comparison, other childrens' books that year include Heinlein's The Rolling Stones and Mary Norton's The Borrowers, both of which are really entertaining and good books which do not resemble the books that come out nowadays in major and significant ways.

Mitchison can be hard to find and I have had better luck with her in academic libraries. The most common are Travel Light (thank you, Small Beer!) and The Corn King and the Spring Queen; if you ever see anything else of hers in a store at an affordable price you should buy it as it is a genuine rare bird. I've never found anything of hers not at least interesting, and if, and this would amaze me, you ever buy and read anything of hers apart from the two aforementioned (I own them) and don't like it, I will cheerfully buy it off you. So you know.

[starlady]

We have about 45 of her books, it looks like, but not Travel Light or The Delicate Fire or Memoirs of a Spacewoman.

Will do!