Tanith Lee has an odd writing style which doesn’t work for me very well.
The people don’t seem to be fleshed out – its sort of like reading about a bunch of robots in a really rich tapestry.
I sort of liked this book, but not very much.
I won’t give a plot summary, as it would be a spoiler, but I’ll give the background.
A world in an ice age. People have evolved to cope with it, but somehow there are icebergs full of fresh fruit that show up regularly enough for people to count on them (this is never explained). There is a rich city-nation, which appears in the first chapter, fascinatingly, then doesn’t appear again until its the focus of attack.
There is a wizard, who is set up for marvelous things – and then isn’t used in the plot line.
This didn’t engage me sufficiently, and there were too many holes in the plotline and overall I just didn’t *care* about the characters.
Its one of those annoying novels where you feel that its going to get good really soon now, so you persist, but it never does.
I started the sequel to this, No Flame But Mine, but after 100 pages I just didn’t feel it was the least bit interesting, so I put it down and won’t include it here.
