[.ca] Runestone (ISBN 0553572806)

fun and suspenseful:
its a don coldsmith book, so you already know its good. the allusions he makes to his earlier spanish-bit novels are always fun to recognize. the book was like all his other books: original, exciting, and hard to put down.

Vikings in the American midwest!...:
Could this be a true story? Almost? This is a great historical account of something that may have actually happened. The runestone does exist. Noone knows how it got there. Coldsmith wrote an entire story around a possible explaination. And very nicely done I might add. It's a long book, but good reading. Slow at times, but never boring. You always want to find out what is going to happen next. He has left it open for a follow up book. Hopefully it will be forthcoming. Definitely worth a read.

Promising @ the outset, but never made it.:
Off to a good start with the description of the Norse settlement @ Straumfjord (where Thorfinn Karlsefni, Leif Eiriksson's successor established his short-lived colony). I picked this up in the book store because of the first few pages which read quite well (& because of my love for things Norse, as well as historical novels in general). But it was a big mistake. There is very little plot here as the shipwrecked viking ("White Wolf" to his Indian friends) gets drawn into the life of The People, learning to grow squash and melons as they move steadily inland and away from any chance our Norse hero has of ever seeing home again. Of course he gradually loses interest in that anyway as he falls more and more deeply in love with his beautiful young Indian wife, Morning Dove (or whatever). The big conflicts they must deal with are whether they should be moving on before the weather overtakes them and curtails the growing season. The highlight of their days is sitting around the campfire in the evenings swapping creation tales. The Norse tales prove as fascinating to The People as The People's do to White Wolf and his erstwhile (and fellow Norse)companion "Fire Man", nee Svenson but named thus by the Indians for his remarkable head of red hair as well as his facility with a flint fire-making kit. With them is a wily old one-eyed Indian whom the Norsemen have named Odin (after their own one-eyed god)who engineers the gradual naturalization of these two Norse expatriates into Indian ways. Odin is forever musing about how The People do not think about the future but only live in the moment at hand. And, of course, he's forever musing about the future, as he plans the next step in the co-opting of White Wolf and Fire Man. He, along with his fellow countrymen, also have a remarkably irritating method of locution, presumably designed to capture the syntax of Indian languages. I for one cannot speak to the accuracy of this, but "I am made to think it is not good." Another annoying bit is how White Wolf continues to refer to Fire Man, in his own mind, as Sven. Of course the name the man has been given by the author, "Svenson", is not a last name in the manner which we are accustomed to at all but rather an appellation signifying that he is the son of a man named Sven. Therefore it is inappropriate for our hero to be referring to him as Sven, given that it is not his name BUT RATHER HIS FATHER'S. But of course this is a pretty small quibble with a book that is this bad. As Odin might have put it: I am made to think I should not have wasted my money. By Stuart W. Mirsky (mirsky@ix.netcom.com

Great book:
Living in Oklahoma wherethe rune stone is located I was interested how Mr.Coldsmith would handel it. Although I am not that much an expert on the Norse way of life I did find it interesting the way he handel the story. To me it was believiable. I was a journey of self discovery to which he was trying to find his way back home. Only to find hewas already home. If you enjoy the Spanish Bit saga you will enjoy this book.