The Ice Museum US Reviews
The Ice Museum appeared in the US in February 2006. Below are some reviews.
Read UK review extracts.
Thule, real or not, is ripe and beguiling material for a literary and geographical adventurer, and Kavenna is formidable on both fronts. Her mission is also highly cerebral, as she ferrets out the literary references and the individuals, often wonderfully eccentric, who support a particular theory of the real Thule... Kavenna makes no apologies for being erudite - and in an age of flippant, self-indulgent travelogues, this in itself is refreshing... Though the Thule quest may now seem ancient, it is far from irrelevant. Kavenna bridges the transition like a master...
Florence Williams, New York Times Book Review
Joanna Kavenna’s The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule investigates the lore of Ultima Thule historically, chiefly through scholarship, and geographically, through her plucky wanderings in Nordic lands. Her pilgrimage begins in Scotland, and takes her to Iceland, Greenland, Norway, Denmark, Estonia, and-well above the Arctic Circle-Svalbard, the fjord-cut archipelago that used to be known as Spitsbergen. The prose reverberates as Kavenna sails up the west coast of Greenland through pack ice... [with] visions straight out of Wallace Stevens... Erudition broadens a seemingly narrow obsession into something illuminating and consequential... Her depictions [are] a wonderful mixture of the exact and the fanciful-much the way icebergs will assume shapes that blend the solid and the fantastic.
Brad Leithauser, New York Review of Books
A well-grounded, suspenseful history of a unique intersection of poetry and geography. In pursuing her passion, Kavenna discovers that the desires we project onto the unknown are always just out of reach.
Jeanne Cooper, San Francisco Chronicle
A chromatic, poised writer with an eye for evocative images. A lambent chronicle of wandering north and encountering an old idea brought forcibly into a new age.
Kirkus
In a gorgeously written and unusual book, Kavenna chronicles her personal journey into the myth and reality of the legendary Arctic land of Thule... The Ice Museum transcends all genre description, and holds its own as a journey into a world that somehow vibrantly exists on paper and nowhere else.
Colleen Mondor, Booklist
In her captivating book The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule: , British author Joanna Kavenna brings the Thule myth to life, seamlessly combining elements of travelogue, detective story, and history book... Armed with intense curiosity, Kavenna struggles to get onto Greenland’s US-run Thule Air Base, joins the gregarious locals at the Thule Bar in Scotland’s Shetland Islands, and drinks coffee with the former president of Estonia. Oddly enough, the people who populate the book are even more fascinating than the chilly locations... One of the most intriguing characters is the young author herself, an intense and otherworldly scholar who even as a child dreamed of the North Pole and memorized the names of explorers... It’s hard to imagine a more enchanting tour guide or, for that matter, a more exotic trip.
Randy Dotinga, Christian Science Monitor
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