If I've read this before, I have no recollection of it. I hope the blurb copy is as inaccurate as such descriptions often are.Well, yes and no. This book combines a fairly detailed and interesting description of winter in New England with a totally unnecessary superimposed (ancient) disaster/recovery story.The viewpoint character is one of Norton's typical deprived women--an orphan raised by an aunt miserly on both material and emotional planes. The Aunt's death (which is offstage) mirrors the death and (slow) resurrection of the ancient society (for which there is, realistically, no evidence. If it's been concealed (lest people lament too much over their losses), it's been too well concealed, even in people's memories).Both the 'good' and the 'evil' survivors of the old society (apparently the same people, cycling through time in a sort of 'cold sleep' alternation) are meddlesome, arrogant, and hateful (ie filled with hate). They don't consider the humans who've forgotten their lost glory to be capable of anything but slavish 'development' under the oversight of their ancient masters. Their only real dispute is whether they should control the ordinary people directly, or indirectly through 'teaching'. Either way, the (quite reasonable and competent) people of a town that's alternately called Waterbridge or Whitebridge (likely the name was changed midstream, and not all the references were replaced) are construed to have no say in the matter, and one presumes this applies to the rest of humanity as well. The pretext for this is that they managed badly on their own. Did they? Or did the 'Guardians' just invent this idea (or spin the evidence) to suit their own plans?The ancestral society is almost completely undescribed. At one point we're shown a storeroom of their treasures, salted away against disaster. But there's no exploration--the treasures comprise just another roadblock in the protagonist's way. And the lives of the people in the society, their histories, their customs, etc, are shown only at the end, when they're already cracking under disaster, and in very sketchy detail, even then. For example, why did the temple have a dungeon under it? Why did the society have such destructive relations with other dimensions? Why didn't the people have any way of detecting and defusing the disaster centuries before it happened? For all their vaunted 'Power', they seem to have been remarkably helpless people. Which leads to another question: At this late date, is it even worthwhile trying to resurrect the ancient society? Or would it be better to let people find their own way, haltingly and erratically as they are? The book is set after 1980 (the eruption of Mt St Helens is glancingly referred to, as if the (completely unsurprising) eruption of one volcano in the circum-Pacific Ring of Fire were necessarily a portent of global disaster), yet despite a few contemporary references, the snowbound town is treated it as if nothing had changed in the centuries since it was built--and not much in the centuries before that.
I've been dragging this around since I bought it back in high school when I was reading everything by Andre Norton. Thirty years later I finally read it to a) get it off my shelf and do what a book is meant to do and b) I needed something for my 'something on the TBR pile forever' challenge. Thirty years qualifies...only now I'm disappointed I've been carrying this around so long. It is definitely one of Ms. Norton's minor works. It took me weeks of setting it aside then bulling through it to ma
