Travel Light is definitely a novel of two parts, which are married together at the end, in an ending I really loved. Firstly the witty, lighter fairytale style first part, with its dragons and its bears and its Valkyries and its Odin, and later the quasi-historical voyage, darker, with a more theological lean. Mitchison is great at both, (although the arrival to Constantinople was a bit tedious and felt sometimes a bit beneath her, with slips into slightly trite orientalist ideas (but then, it was 1952). But she approaches most everything with a critical examining eye and the occasional bit of drollness. She has that very distinct postwar fantasy concern with using the genre to try to understand a rapidly changing and industrialising world that has been devastated perhaps irretrievably (as Lewis and Tolkien and Peake do), as well as using it to convey a great sadness for the pre-war world that used to be; Halla's semi-bildungsroman is a great conduit to this. It also had something of an element of medieval mysticism to it that I enjoyed as well; I liked the appearance of the idea that a lot of what was understood as magical by some perspectives, is understood as divine or miraculous by other eyes, and it all jumbles together into one big wonder-response and wish for a kinder future or a greater purpose.

I'm really happy this fab little book is getting a big deal rerelease; it sits at such a significant place in the development of the fantasy genre and there is so much about it which echoes down; I can absolutely see how this is a forerunner to Le Guin, for example, and why she liked Mitchison so much. It has the same thoughtfulness and depth of prose, and towards the end I was reminded of Tehanu quite profoundly. And Mitchison was a contemporary, correspondent, and friend of Tolkien, thanked by him in one letter for taking Fellowship seriously as a piece of literature. It's a truly charming and pensive fantasy forerunner with lots and lots of mythological, folkloric, and heroic influence, that deserves to be brought back into the mainstream genre consciousness, much in the same way as Hope Mirrlees's Lud-In-The-Mist has begun to be rediscovered. Women's writing has always been important to fantasy. I hope that more of Mitchison's work will be reissued or become more easily available, on the back of this; I want to be able to get hold of some more of it. And I want a copy of To the Chapel Perilous that isn't a million quid on AbeBooks!

[AD - e-ARC gifted via Netgalley but all opinions my own]

3.5! Lee has here a novel with a really strong ecocritical bent, which is excellent, and it has some thoughtful examinations of capitalism, corporate exploitation, etc, both thematically speaking and on a sentence level. But it does feel to me as if everything was touched on relatively lightly, here? It didn't feel as if anything went very deep, either the ideas or the characters, and I found it a slightly flat read; sometimes the simplistic prose was a boon and it worked really well and it was propulsive, other times it was a bit of an obstruction and made moments of supposed drama seem a bit underwhelming. I haven't read any Lee before so I'm not familiar with her writing style, I can't say if this is typical or not. This is one of those books where you can really see it being a film, which is probably great for trying to sell film rights, and it does make for pacy reading when we're in action scenes, but it doesn't do much in the way of being a book that makes the most of its medium. And as I say, I didn't find the characters massively compelling, except for maybe Kob? I liked Isako (and I always like seeing older women being the protagonists of the story) and I felt sorry for Martim, but as the book is split between them both, it can't truly go into massive depth on either, although Lee does give a it a good go. But as most of Isako's relationships to her old colleagues, mentors, mentees, etc are in the past (necessary thanks to the 'Last Contract' of it all, of course) it's more that we're just being told that they're important to her, rather than having it proven. There are lots of good ideas here that I found really interesting, but they tend to be touched on only once or twice and then sort of abandoned or petering out, like Waterboy and the badgeless bits. The pacing wasn't bad, though it takes a bit to get going, and the halfway switch was a good surprise. I wasn't that shocked to read the author's note at the end and find out Lee changed and rewrote the ending halfway through drafting, though, I think you can tell a little bit. Enjoyable and a solid read with some strong messaging, but I felt it was a bit fumbly in some of the execution, and it didn't delve as deep into its ideas as I would have liked it to.