" Travel Light is the story of Halla, a girl born to a king but cast out onto the hills to die. She lives among bears; she lives among dragons. But the time of dragons is passing, and Odin All-Father offers Halla a choice: Will she stay dragonish and hoard wealth and possessions, or will she travel light?" —Amal El-Mohtar, NPR, You Must Read This From the dark ages to modern times, from the dragons of medieval forests to Constantinople, this is a fantastic and philosophical fairy-tale journey that will appeal to fans of Harry Potter, Diana Wynne Jones, and T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone. "No one knows better how to spin a fairy tale than Naomi Mitchison.”— The Observer "Read it now."—Ursula K. Le Guin "You will love this book."—Holly Black "The enchantments of Travel Light contain more truth, more straight talking, a grittier, harder-edged view of the world than any of the mundane descriptions of daily life you will find in … science fiction stories." — Paul Kincaid, SF Site "A gem of a book." — Strange Horizons "Every page is full of magic and wonder….well worth seeking out."— Rambles "Combines the best of Rowling and Pullman, being full of magic and fantasy with the hard edge of reality sharp at its edges." — The New Review/LauraHird.com "Disarmingly familiar, like a memory only half-recalled. You will love this book." -- Holly Black (Valiant, The Spiderwick Chronicles) "Every page is full of magic and wonder.... well worth seeking out." -- Rambles "Read it now!" -- Ursula K. Le Guin, author of Gifts Travel Light is the second title in the Peapod Classics reprint line. Peapod Classics is a new, handy-sized, occasional series from Small Beer Press. These are books we love so much -- books we missed being able to find in our favorite book shops -- that we had to bring them back into print. Each Peapod Classics title features a cover illustration by rising comics artist Kevin Huizenga. Praise for Naomi Mitchison: "No one knows better how to spin a fairy tale than Naomi Mitchison." -- The Observer "Mitchison breathes life into such perennial themes as courage, forgiveness, the search for meaning, and self-sacrifice." --Publishers Weekly "She writes enviably, with the kind of casual precision which ... comes by grace." -- Times Literary Supplement "One of the great subversive thinkers and peaceable transgressors of the twentieth century.... We are just catching up to this wise, complex, lucid mind that has for ninety-seven years been a generation or two ahead of her time." -- Ursula K. Le Guin, author of Gifts "Her descriptions of ritual and magic are superb; no less lovely are her accounts of simple, natural things -- water-crowfoot flowers, marigolds, and bright-spotted fish. To read her is like looking down into deep warm water, through which the smallest pebble and the most radiant weed shine and are seen most clearly; for her writing is very intimate, almost as a diary, or an autobiography is intimate, and yet it is free from all pose, all straining after effect; she is telling a story so that all may understand, yet it has the still profundity of a nursery rhyme. -- Hugh Gordon Proteus, New Statesman and Nation Travel Light is the tale of a marvelous journey that will transport you into Halla's world where a basilisk might be met in the desert, heroes are taken to Valhalla by Valkyries, and a fortune might be made with a word to the right horse. This short and fabulous book transports the reader from a cave in the forest to a dragon's lair to the wonders of early Constantinople. It's dense and light, happy and sad, and all around amazing -- and short enough that once it's read you'll have time to read it all over again. Naomi Mitchison, author of over 70 books, died in 1999 at the age of 101. She was born in and lived in Scotland but traveled widely throughout the world. In the 1960s she was adopted as adviser and mother of the Bakgatla tribe in Botswana. Her books include historical fiction, science fiction, poetry, autobiography, and nonfiction, the most popular of which are The Corn King and the Spring Queen, The Conquered, and Memoirs of a Spacewoman. Her New York Times obituary included this correction: “An obituary on Saturday about Naomi Mitchison, the British writer and early feminist, misspelled the surname of the Labor Party leader at whom she once threw a half-plucked partridge. He was Hugh Gaitskell, not Gaitskill.” Chapter 1 The Bears Travel LightIt is said that when the new Queen saw the old Queen’s baby daughter, she told the King that the brat must be got rid of at once. And the King, who by now had almost forgotten the old Queen and had scarcely looked at the baby, agreed and thought no more about it. And that would have been the end of that baby girl, but that her nurse, Matulli, came to hear of it. Now this nurse was from Finmark, and, like many another from thereabouts, was apt to take on the shape of an animal from time to time. So she turned herself i