The Legend of Dragonmoon by Alison Zeitler   

By The Holland Times Friday 11 December 2009, 11:12

The mythology of Scandinavia and Germany is as old as the mythology of the Mediterranean but considerably less influential.  The gods of Greece and the Near East dominate everything from our school curricula to our calendar - two of the English names of days of the week, Wednesday and Thursday, recall the northern European pantheon over which Wotan and Thor reign supreme.
But, when it comes to fantasy literature, the Anglophone imagination is forever looking north, to the lands of witches, trolls, and dragons. That is the setting of The Legend of Dragonmoon: The Big Green House, a short novel that follows a trio of teen female cousins on a quest to rescue their great aunt’s home in Norway. In the process, they not only manage to save the magical lakeside estate that lends this novel its title, a place where the natural and the supernatural are never far from each other, but they help preserve an ancient Scandinavian cultural inheritance from the onslaught of greedy unbelievers. Just in case the armchair explorer tires of the adolescent bickering, there’s buried gold, a Nazi treasure map, and a Midsummer’s Eve dragon-sighting. There is even a recipe for the sweet, heavy Lafsor cakes that help the Norwegians make it through those long, cold, dark winters.
There is no English term that captures the ambivalence of the Dutch spannend - “thrilling” carries only positive connotations, while “tense” is never welcome.  The author, a South African poet who now makes her home in the Netherlands, manages to capture both sensations in this gripping yet light-hearted tale.