The Ice Palace

A story about two 11 year old girls in a rural Scandinavian village. One day one of the girls wanders into a half frozen waterfall and goes missing.

The story is pretty short and there is not a lot happening story wise. Most of the book is about describing the cold wintery landscape in a very lyrical matter.

I know that the main characters are 11 year old girls and I'm the furthest from that particular mindset, but their cryptic conversations and the way they handled things made me want to scream at them.

All dialogues in the book are very cryptic and more akin to poems, which is really fitting with the lyrical landscape description mentioned above and the overall writing style. But in the end it all blurred together and I was skipping more and more passages.

It started interesting and the part which describes how the girl wanders off and goes deeper and deeper into the wilderness is cleverly written, but everything after that frustrated me.

A quick search shows a million forum posts decrying that this is about lesbians but no other interpretation of the story makes any sense. Just looking at the hard facts and no personal interpretation of the ice stuff...
-unn keeps away from the other kids for reasons she refuses to talk about
-siss keeps starring at unn at school to the extent the other kids comment on it. Her reaction is basically “and what about it”
- the connection they feel that they cant put into words and their weird awkwardness and excitement around eachother which the first 25% of the story describes
- “we should take our clothes off itd be fun - no wait im embarrassed now this was the worst idea”
-unn tells siss that she has some deep secret that she wouldn't even tell her mother but she may tell siss who then freaks out because she doesn't want to hear it yet and leaves
-talking about the same secret unn says she won't go to heaven
- the next day siss is excited to meet unn at school and greet her so that all her friends know “how they stand”
- siss freaking out about people asking what unn told her even though she technically said nothing unn obviously knows what unn meant.
- siss is afraid the unnamed new leader girl of her friend group will end up missing like unn because she took a liking to her and tells her basically that they can't go to eachothers houses.


Either the author intended to write it as a lesbian story or he has no idea how kids talk to eachother. Either way if you're reading this in the current century it's impossible not to read it as gay.

..this isn't a review I just got annoyed at some forum posts from 2004 ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I'm a chionophile (Cold weather lover), so I was predisposed to like this anyway. Still, Vesaas enhances a reasonably familiar story with his lyrical description of the frost, icicles and snow that engulf this rural Norwegian village. Vesaas describes Unn's enchantment with the ice palace with such beauty that I'm giving this an extra star just for that. I think the character development lacked a bit, which disconnected me a little from the plot.