Andre Norton is a prolific author and like most prolific authors, she has her off-moments. Regrettably, Ice Crown appears to have been written in one of them. This story of Roane, the efficient but love-starved girl from an advanced world who becomes embroiled in cloak and dagger work among the aristocracy of the primitive planet Clio, could have been a good one. But after a promising (if extremely compressed and allusive) start, it drags its weary length out … without ever really convincing the reader that what is happening matters very much. Except where Roane is facing the antagonism of her own people, and the conflict of loyalties and ways of thinking comes into sharp focus, I was simply bored—no recommendation for a book intended for young readers. The characters are mostly cardboard, the writing tired, the details of life on Clio thin in the extreme—apart from...