A Certain Slant of Light

I have been remiss, these in these last few American Girl series reviews, in churning pit fic ideas. The 1850s and 1860s are chock full of dramatic potential, I realize, but they just don’t speak to me.

But now! Now I am going to make up for lost time! For we have reached the early twentieth century, which is the time period I study, and we have reached Samantha, who was my second favorite American Girl in my youth! She’s the most imaginative of them, building castles in the air. (I would argue there’s a distinction between imaginative and artistic: imaginative Samantha dreams possibilities, while artistic Josefina finds beauty in the real world, and moreover creates beauty, singing playing music and growing flowers.

...I still kind of want Josefina fic.)

Samantha’s imagination is only a side note, though: the heart of the books is Samantha’s friendship with Nellie, a working class girl who starts out as a servant at the house next door and ends up being adopted by Samantha’s aunt after she’s orphaned. My first fic idea, therefore, was “fic about how Nellie adjusts to being adopted by Samantha’s upper class family,” because really, that had to be a tough transition, even though the last Samantha book pretty much presents it as “and then they lived happily ever after.”

But American Girl beat me to it: there’s a companion book to the Samantha series, Nellie’s Promise, which pretty much hits everything that I would have wanted in a Nellie fic. The difficulties of trying to be grateful for a change that is painful (even if it’s also wonderful), of adjusting to Samantha’s swanky school and of becoming Samantha’s sister rather than her friend: all there, and all well-handled.

So that fic is unnecessary. What about romance, then? Unlike Felicity & Elizabeth, I don’t see much romantic potential for Nellie & Samantha: even before they actually become stepsisters, they really seem more like sisters.

There are people in this world - I used to be friends with one of them - who believe that future!Samantha should get together with her neighbor Eddie Ryland. This is a terrible idea. Eddie Ryland is a twerp. He put salt in the ice cream at Samantha’s birthday party. Salt in ice cream. Sacrilege! Samantha should never, ever be with him.

Actually I felt more sympathetic to Eddie this read-through than I did as a child. He’s clearly lonely and wants to play with Samantha, who always snubs him severely, to which he reacts by, for instance, putting salt in the ice cream. It’s a vicious cycle.

So...maybe you can convince me of their True Love? Preferably with fic! Samantha becomes a Red Cross nurse and falls in love with Eddie Ryland while nursing him back to health from a World War I war wound?

The problem is that this story is so much better with anyone in the world aside from Eddie Ryland. Samantha becomes a Red Cross nurse and falls for a wounded French pilot! Samantha becomes a Red Cross pilot and falls for a wounded French pilot who is secretly a girl in disguise! Samantha becomes a Red Cross nurse and falls for a wounded German pilot who is secretly a girl in disguise!

Okay, that last one has awesome dramatic possibilities. I call dibs.

It is also pretty much utterly divorced from the Samantha books, aside from the character of Samantha herself. This is the problem with a lot of my ideas for Samantha fic: it’s all Samantha futurefic, and Samantha futurefic, unlike Felicity futurefic, kind of demands a new setting and a new cast of characters, because the thing that interesting about Samantha’s time period is women leaving home and meeting new people and doing things they weren’t allowed to do before.

One last thought: in book five, we find that Samantha’s grandmother (called Grandmary) has a British beau, Admiral Archibald Beemer. After her husband died, Beemer continued coming to Grandmary’s summer retreat. Every year, he asks her to marry him - and every year, she says no. But somehow between books five and six, Admiral Archibald Beemer and Grandmary get hitched! Why did she change her mind? Is there anything sweeter than old people falling in love?

(And how did they meet, anyway? He was her husband's best friend, but that still leaves a lot of questions. It doesn't seem like a British admiral and an American...whatever Grandmary's first husband was...businessman? - would run in the same circles. And is there OT3 potential?)

The Addy books are the best written of the American Girl books, I think. The six books tell a complete, tightly woven story. You never get the feeling, as you sometimes do in the other series, that this or that book (charming though it is) could be left out without harming the overall thrust of the series.

And the characters are so much fun! Again, there’s an older single woman - this time much older: M’Dear, the widowed mother of the keeper of the boardinghouse where Addy stays. “I was there the day God made dirt,” M’Dear tells Addy; and the two of them, along with M’Dear’s singing bird Sunny, become friends. (Intergenerational friendships! Hooray!)

The Addy books quite handily thread the needle that we discussed back in the Kirsten books, of presenting an ugly piece of history to children without either whitewashing it or traumatizing them. In that earlier discussion, anomilygrace suggested that children need hope in their books, perhaps more than adults do, and judging by the Addy books, I think she’s onto something. Back when my mom read the Addy books to me, I was shocked by some of the things that happen to Addy: her father and brother get sold south, the overseer feeds her tobacco worms when her grief distracts her from her work.

But I didn’t feel brutalized by it like I did by, say, Bridge to Terabithia - or for that matter Jacob Have I Loved. Nobody even dies in that book, but it’s nonetheless replete with hopelessness.

The Addy books, on the other hand, skillfully weave hope into their difficult situation. Though Addy’s family is broken up in the first book, they’re reunited by the last, a situation that Porter cleverly makes plausible by having Addy's family discuss running away before Addy's father and brother were sold. They had picked a destination - Philadelphia - so although the family is shattered, they all know where to meet up.

In a lot of the American Girl series, I find on rereading that I’ve forgotten most of the siblings: but I remembered Addy’s. Her good-naturedly teasing big brother Sam reminded me of my brother, and his reunion with Addy stuck with me all these years. It’s a touching, lovely scene, sweet and fun and a little sad, too, because he lost an arm fighting in the war. It’s not untinctured by tragedy. But that touch of bitterness makes the hopeful reunion more sweet.

The Addy series is not only the best written, but also the gutsiest - a fact that is all the more obvious reading them back to back with the Marie-Grace & Cecile books, which mostly sweep prejudice under the rug. The Addy books, in the other hand, face the issue head-on. Prejudice is a sort of background radiation, infecting employment opportunities, parades, ice cream parlors and streetcars. Addy reacts accordingly: "I hate white people," she comments, more than once.

Addy's parents gently try to steer her away from this. It's ultimately self-destructive to focus too much energy on hate, they say; focus on loving your family and our friends. There's a sense threaded throughout the books that everything is not going to be all right, that some things are broken - Addy's brother loses his arm; Addy's friend Sarah has to leave school to help her family earn money - and they're going to remain so.

But despite that, there's a delicate joy in the books as well: Addy's friendship with Sarah, with M'Dear, the scene where she learns to jump rope double dutch. It's an exquisite balancing act.

I realize this is both on the wrong day and out of order, but...it’s Saint Lucia Day! How could I not post about Kirsten Larson, American Girl's Swedish-American immigrant girl? The scene where she wears a candle-studded crown of wintergreen is emblazoned on my brain!

Seriously. I wanted to wear such a crown so much after I saw that picture.

Kirsten is the girliest of the American Girls. Unlike Felicity, she never complains about doing women’s work or yearns to do boy things. She’s perfectly happy to spend her school recesses sitting in the sun, sewing a quilt with her friends; and the first thing she notices on arriving in America were the women’s pretty ruffled dresses. Her favorite color is even pink!

I feel constrained to add that pink didn’t become a “girl” color till the 1910s - before then, forceful pink was considered suitable for boys, while cool, tranquil blue was for girls. Possibly Kirsten has a secret rebel heart? Maybe nineteenth-century Swedish immigrants just don’t care about girl and boy colors?

But of course the book was written for American girls in the late 20th century, so I think Kirsten’s favorite color is meant to show that Kirsten has the heart of a girly-girl - and that being a girly-girl is perfectly compatible with being brave, kind, and adventurous, the American Girl trifecta of virtues.

Aside from the Saint Lucia crown, I had forgotten almost everything about these books. I recalled Kirsten's secret friend Singing Bird, whose tribe leaves Minnesota because there's nothing to hunt now that the settlers are shooting all the game.

It's a very bloodless displacement, which is perhaps problematic. But then again, I don't think "And then the US Army swooped in and shot all the natives and Kirsten found Singing Bird's bullet-riddled corpse in the snow!" would have been an appropriate scene in a book for eight-year-olds.

I argued in my paper (because in a paper one must make a stand) that the important thing about this story line is the emotional valence. Kirsten doesn't know all the nasty backstory to US government-Indian relations, but she knows that losing her friend is sad, so young readers will be primed to know that it's sad that settlers pushed Indians off their land. I'm waffling about whether this holds water.

Dealing with the really ugly parts of history is, I think, a difficult part of writing historical fiction for children. This is especially true for something like, well, Indian-settler relations, because there's a strong contingent of people who adamantly don't want to believe that white settlers did anything wrong.

But I'm thinking also of for instance children's books about the Holocaust. After Number the Stars I read tons of these books, and I daresay the authors wrote them with the highest of raising-Holocaust-awareness intentions, and my eight-to-ten-year-old awareness was indeed raised, in a "The Holocaust is a great setting for running-away-from-the-Nazis adventure yarns" kind of way. I loathed Donna Jo Napoli's Stones in Water because it's too gritty to be read that way.

I'm wondering if trying to teach children the ugly parts of history through historical fiction isn't like trying to teach them about Death by giving them books like Old Yeller or Bridge to Terabithia. Some will doubtless be receptive; but lots of people have stories about their ferocious youthful rejection of Old Yeller and its ilk, and I suspect gritty!historical!tragedy would strike lots of kids the same way.

But! Getting back to Kirsten! And on a happier note! Let's talk about my very favorite character from the Kirsten series, the only one I remembered aside from Kirsten and Singing Bird! (And poor benighted Marta, of course.)

Miss Winston! Kirsten’s stern but awesome schoolteacher from Maine. Miss Winston's father sails ships; and apparently that wanderlust is heritable, because Miss Winston became a teacher because she “wanted to travel, to meet people, to have adventures!” How cool is that?

The girls scheme with her to pull off their Saint Lucia Day celebration. No wonder she was my favorite.

I remembered there being a great deal more Miss Winston backstory than in fact there is in the books. This often happens with books I read as a child (or had read to me, in the case of Kirsten).

The Sending was supposed to be the last book in the Obernewtyn Chronicles. A lot of books were supposed to be the last book in the Obernewtyn Chronicles - I think this trend goes all the way back to Ashling (which is totally the best: the ravek scene still makes me swoon a little) - but The Sending really was supposed to be the last one.

The Sending has been split into two books. The last book - really the last book in the series, like for real this time - is supposed to come out in 2013.

OH MY GOD WHAT IS THIS I DON’T EVEN AAAAARGH.

I would feel better about this, except nothing happens in The Sending. There are two hundred pages in the middle of the book which could be summed up, God help us, just like this:

“Day after day Gahltha and I walked deeper into the mountains, ours heads down against the icy winds. I ate as little as I could, but our food supply dwindled, and I worried how I might feed myself once it ran out. For now, we might forage in the mountains, but what could I eat once we reached tainted ground? And what would I drink? For I had brought only two gourds with me.

But whenever I ran low on water, we found a new stream. Perhaps acceptance was one of the lessons that I must learn from this journey if I were to complete my quest. (This book positively valorizes unpreparedness. I get that there’s something about faith going on, but, uh, I really don’t believe the world will take care of you if you fling yourself blindly into it, so I’m not sure why the book blithely insists that it will.)

I knew that I would never return to Obernewtyn, yet that knowledge ached less than it once had. As we followed the crumbling Beforetime road through the thin, clear mountain air, I felt as though my old life were falling away from me. Even the thought of my love Rushton pained me less.”

Ta-da! Two hundred pages summarized! Two hundred pages that could have been filled with actual plot! Two hundred pages wherein Elspeth could have found and interpreted at least one of the signs she’s supposed to find, which will help her defeat the deadly weaponmachines that will otherwise complete a total nuclear annihilation of her world!

It is testament to Carmody’s skill, really, that despite the fact that nothing happens for two hundred pages - and precious little in the two hundred pages on either side - the book never drags. I kept turning pages, eagerly floating along the inconsequential stream.

***

You may be wondering, given my frustration, what I found so intoxicating about the first few Obernewtyn books. There are a lot of long-winded answers I could give, but the short version is:

At the beginning of the series, Obernewtyn is a remote mountain fortress whence people with strange powers are banished. These people are called Misfits.

Misfits. With Capitalization! Is there a word more ordained to draw the attention of a disaffected thirteen-year-old?

***

So, yes. Isobelle Carmody. A very good writer, but she never finished her series, so at this point I don’t feel comfortable recommending anything she’s written except Alyzon Whitestarr. It’s fun, it’s got cool telepathic powers - Alyzon can smell people’s auras! - and a wonderful group of friends: I love Gilly and Harrison particularly.

And, most of all, it’s a standalone.

It is Saturday! And you know what that means: time for another essay about an American Girl heroine! This time, Caroline, the newest member of the American Girl coterie.

Lake Ontario, 1812. A British ship stops Caroline Abbott and her father while they sail their new sloop. Though the Abbotts didn’t know it, the United States and Britain are at war; and the British sailors requisition the sloop and take Caroline’s father, a master shipbuilder, captive.

And we’re off! The War of 1812 is terribly exciting and disgracefully neglected, and both for the same reason: it’s the last war where a foreign nation posed a serious threat to US sovereignty. The British actually burned down Washington DC. Apparently the embarrassment of having our capital sacked makes it a war better forgotten.

Caroline lives far away from DC, but her home on the border with Canada makes for plenty of excitement on its own. Because Caroline’s father is captive, her mother and grandmother take a more active role than they otherwise might. Her mother runs the family shipyard; her grandmother, who lived through the Revolutionary War, runs the house despite her advancing arthritis. “Don’t complain,” she always advises Caroline. “Find a way to change the situation!”

And Caroline does. When the British attack Caroline’s hometown - twice! - Caroline aids in the fight. She has her own little sea battle! She sinks her beloved skiff, the Sparrow, to block a small warship that is chasing a bateau carrying supplies to the American shipyards. (Why are there not more “girl with boat” stories? They’re at least as exciting as “girl with horse!”)

Sacrifice in the service of country is a theme throughout Caroline’s series - a theme shared only by the Molly books, I believe, and even there it’s much more muted. There’s an eerie scene where Caroline and her mother wander through the family’s beloved shipyard, where we have spent so much time over the preceding four books that it feels like Caroline’s second home, preparing to set the place on fire if the British conquer the town.

The series lacks what one might call the ficability of Felicity’s story: none of Caroline’s friendships caught my fancy quite like Felicity’s. (It helps of course that Felicity’s story has lain in the leafmold of my mind a lot longer.) But Caroline is a very taking character: eminently worth an afternoon’s time.

Normally I don't like to pick favorites, but sometimes the evidence is simply so overwhelming as to make favorites inevitable. In this case: Felicity is the best American Girl.

Item the first: She steals a horse. And not only does she steal it, but she sneaks out for a month beforehand to train it to be ridden. Dedication!

Item the second: She has one of the most satisfying best friend stories out of the American Girl series. The friends you have when you’re nine are not necessarily people who will be good friends when you’re older, but Elizabeth and Felicity have enough in common that I think they could go the difference. But they also make good foils for each other: Elizabeth shows Felicity how to be more thoughtful, while Felicity helps Elizabeth stand up for herself.

Also, Elizabeth is memorable. The American Girls themselves are always vivid, but the supporting characters are a bit more hit and miss. (Who remembers Molly’s best friends, for instance? There’s a reason Molly’s best friend doll is Emily, their British boarder: she’s much more interesting than Molly’s American friends, whose names I forget.)

The fact that their friendship effectively dramatizes the social tensions of the revolution helps make her memorable, of course. Elizabeth’s family are Loyalists and Felicity’s, Patriots (aside from Felicity’s grandfather), and these differing loyalties insistently try to tug them apart; but their friendship is strong enough to survive.

Item the third: Felicity’s series also has the best future romance candidate.

In fact, I would argue that Felicity’s series is the only one with a good future romance candidate. (Which makes perfect sense. How many people meet their spouse when they’re nine, anyway?) There are crazy people who think Samantha and Eddie Rylant will make a match - as if! But I’ll discuss this more when I come to the Samantha books.

Ben and Felicity, though? They’re both fiery and stubborn, but not so stubborn that they let their ideals cause needless pain to people that they love. And they keep each other’s secrets! The only problem is that they are so perfectly suited, not only in temperament but also on the social scale, that their parents might just marry them off to each other. Which is so undramatic! Clearly I must come up with a good reason for them to part, so they can meet again in 1787 to argue about the Federalist papers during the minuet. If people still minueted in 1787?

Item the fourth: Felicity’s family. It occurs to me that I could just sum this all up as “The Felicity books have the best characters, okay?”

But it would have been easy to make villains of Felicity’s Loyalist grandfather, or Felicity’s mother who is always trying to get her to be more ladylike, and instead the books show that they are doing the best that they know how, even if they may be wrong. Both characters are mentors for Felicity.

The American Girl series generally have wise and thoughtful families (though sometimes outside adults are evil: c.f. Jiggy Nye, the man whose abuse of his horse led Felicity into horse-thievery). Doubtless this is part of why they have a reputation for wholesomeness.

Item the fifth: She’s a redhead. QED.

A splendid day! We went shopping, and I got a spiffy red jacket - we had lunch at the Greek place, and I attempted to suss out the secret to their amazing lentil soup, but alas, it remains a little beyond me. (I do have an slightly-less-amazing-but-still-very-tasty lentil soup recipe, though. I should post it when I'm back at school and have access to the recipe.)

And then we went to Whole Foods and I ate all the things. They had some amazing gingerbread samples out, so I got two of my friends gingerbread for Christmas. Food for Christmas, it's a thing, right?

***

I also finished reading the Kaya books. I first tried to read the Kaya books when I was fourteen or fifteen, when they first came out. I didn’t make it very far, being too old for the writing style and too young to overcome it through indulgent nostalgia; and anyway, the first Kaya book is not very good. It's more a series of vignettes than one connected story.

The second book, though, the second book! The story really takes off in the second book. Kaya and Speaking Rain, her blind adoptive sister, get kidnapped by another tribe during a raid! Kaya escapes, but she has to leave Speaking Rain behind! And also her horse! But in a later book, she finds Speaking Rain again! But Speaking Rain had escaped, nearly perished, been found by a Salish woman who saved her life, and therefore pledged to remain with the Salish woman forevermore! So Kaya has found her sister, only to lose her again!!!!!!!!!

You can already see me eating this up with a spoon.

(And don't worry, they figure out a way that Speaking Rain can keep her vow - everyone takes this vow totally seriously, even though Speaking Rain is like eight - and also spend some time with Kaya and her tribe. They also find the horse. And Kaya inherits a name. Oh, and she gets a puppy!)

So, yeah. The Kaya books? Loads of fun. For all that the author is not Nez Perce - given that American Girl carefully got an African American author for the Addy books and a Jewish author for the Rebecca books, I don't know why they didn't do that here - American Girl did get the Nez Perce tribe involved in the process of putting these books together, and the author clearly did loads of research, so they are at least a good jumping off point.

I can't recall that I've read any books about Native Americans pre-contact with white settlers before (Do such children's books not exist? Did I just not look for them as a child? Either is possible), so they're interesting for that reason too: it's a very different past than most of the other historical fiction books explore. Both the Dear America books with Native American protags were post-contact, I think, and one was actually in a boarding school...

OH. Speaking of Dear America. The series was so popular that there are apparently related series all across the Anglophone world - Dear Canada, My Story (for the UK), My Australian Story...

I'm so curious about these! If only I'd known, I could have picked some up when I was in Britain for study abroad, or in Australia when I was 17. There's a blitzkrieg story! And a suffragette's story! And a Spanish lady-in-waiting of Catherine of Aragon story! Also inexplicably a Roman girl in ancient Pompeii (either she gets away before the volcano blows, or most depressing diary ever).

But. I have my American Girl project. I am not going to be swayed from my purpose by books that aren't even available to me anyway!

I've been reading Ann Douglas's The Feminization of American Culture, which is exceptionally frustrating in the way that only academic feminist-leaning books from the seventies can be. There is this sense - how do I explain it? - that Douglas has really bought into the valorization of the masculine: that she really believes that war and strength and rigorous logic are essentially masculine (and automatically interesting), and sentimentality and weakness are essentially feminine (and soppy and boring).

Rather than rejecting this binary as inherently unfair, she seems to think that the problem is solely that people see masculinity as a boys-only club. And thus, she mourns the descent of stringent Puritan theology into liberal religious sentimentality. The Puritan construction of God-as-Cthulhu might not be very attractive, but by God at least it was rigorous and manly.

It's not that I think she ought to enjoy sentimentalist literature. But there's a difference between saying "This kind of extravagant emotionality is not really to my taste, or to modern taste generally, but let's consider why people might have liked it in the context of their time" - you know, actually considering it historically - and saying, "This sentimentalism is so girly and icky and it valorizes, of all things, WEAKNESS. Weakness! I ask you! Most unforgivable character trait in the world. We should all be strength-worshipping Nietzscheans!"

This is still an implicit attitude I see a lot in feminist-leaning criticism of pop culture. No character trait is less excusable than weakness. We should all despise Fanny Price and her milquetoast sisters. No, we shouldn't sympathize with their suffering: they brought it on themselves by their own weakness, they basically deserve it for daring to be born shy and retiring and in a situation where there was no encouragement for them to work past that.

This isn't to say that we shouldn't criticize patterns of portraying women as weak. But there's a world of difference between saying "This pattern of character portrayal is bad, and we should change it," and "Weak people suck! They deserve to suffer for being so weak! How dare they let themselves be victimized???"

I just finished Edith Wharton's House of Mirth. I think there is only one way to express the range and depths of my feelings about this book, and that is to scream, "What the fuck, Edith Wharton! What the fuck?"

So our heroine - I use this word loosely - our heroine is Lily Bart, scion of Old New York, whose chief object in life is to marry a rich husband and live in luxury. But! She is tragically incapable of fulfilling this goal, because her immense sensitivity makes it impossible for her to marry a man she does not love: she keeps coming to the cusp of a proposal, then sabotaging herself.

This would be an infinitely more sympathetic story if Lily's sensitivity did not seem to consist chiefly of an exquisite scorn for everyone who is not exactly to her taste. This means everyone in the world except for Lawrence Selden, the man she loves but will not marry because...because...it's never quite explained. Selden's part of high society, so it's not his position, and he seems to have a reasonable amount of money.

It's not just that I think her goals are unlikely to bring her happiness (though I do), and therefore find it frustrating that she clings to them. Not is it solely that I think she's a shallow, petty person, far less sympathetic than Wharton seems to believe (though I think that too).

She's so bloody helpless. The narrative offers her dozens of ways out of her predicament. She gets marriage offers, both from her beloved Selden and from sundry other rich men; she gets a legacy from her aunt; she has it in her power to blackmail her enemies; she has a friend who would be happy to let her move in till she gets back on her feet.

But no! None of these are acceptable to Lily! They all somehow offend her scruples - we get dragged through every vicissitude of her scruples. Her scruples are exactly nice enough to make it impossible for her to extricate herself from her difficulties, though not fine enough to prevent any of them.

( spoilers )

Rosemary Sutcliff’s Sword Song stands out among her oeuvre in that the hero’s most important relationship is with his female love interest. I liked Angharad a lot, and if she’d shown up earlier than four-fifths of the way through the novel, I probably would have liked the book a lot too.

However, the pre-Angharad four-fifths are a hard slog, so as much as I like her I can’t recommend it. The story, such as it is, concerns the picaresque adventures of Bjarni Sigurdson, as he drifts around Norse Scotland and Ireland and possibly Wales, selling his sword and failing to make friends.

There are characters in the world so fascinating that you don’t really need strong supporting characters (switching genres completely: Judy Abbott in Daddy-long-legs), but Bjarni is so far from being one of them that one could march a troop of elephants through the gap. He doesn’t much like anyone but his dog, at least until he meets Angharad. Oh, and he briefly has a friend called Erd or Erp or something, but as my confusion indicates, Er-whatsit was not very memorable.

ALSO. It is ENTIRELY CLEAR to me that Angharad’s life has been infinitely more interesting and tragic than Bjarni’s - her cousin wanted to marry her! Her father let her go to a nunnery to escape! At which nunnery she learned herblore, until she returned home when her brother died! Now everyone suspects she’s a witch, but she heals them anyway! While cross-dressing!

Clearly far more interesting protagonist material than boring, self-centered Bjarni.

In fact, all the female characters in this novel are far superior to their male counterparts. The various jarls and ship-lords run together (though I have a soft spot for Onund Treefoot, who is captain despite his pegleg), but I loved the Lady Aud: Aud the Deep-Minded, they call her, for she is very wise. She has a former Irish queen as her handmaiden, and they are clearly BFFs in the Marcus & Esca mold. She sails gracefully out of the story to Iceland, and how I longed to go with her instead of Bjarni. Especially if she meets trolls or something.

(Seriously, wouldn’t that be cool? The Adventures of the Lady Aud, Who Is Like Sixty but Still Has Adventures. Pity I don’t know any Icelandic folklore.)

But yeah, that doesn’t happen. Instead we continue to follow Bjarni, and he remains dull until we meet Angharad. I am pretty sure she only likes him because he’s the only person in three leagues who doesn’t think she’s a witch. Wouldn’t it be a better story if...I don’t know...Angharad ended up on Lady Aud’s ship somehow? Because ICELAND!