Almost an indulgence, a bit repetitive,but as appropriate a tribute to the intermittent cycle of freeze and thaw and our ability to witness it as individuals as ever have here could be. In each generation’s observation of a fallen sparrow, of the way the freeze creates an alternative path, public space, economy we are forced to acknowledge the limits of our own temporal experience of the world and its rhythms .

I got this book for Christmas last year and have been reading bits of it slowly since the spring. I finished it off as I was enroute to a readers' advisory seminar where Humphreys was the lunch speaker. It is a fascinating idea done extremely well. She researched all the times the Thames in London froze over between 1142 and 1895 and wrote vignettes for each of those instances. They are short, each 5 pages or less, and interspersed with illustrations. Each one is a engrossing look at a moment in time and the points of view are extremely varied. All of the stories are based on real events and give a strong sense of time and place.
I was also fascinated by the interesting information given in passing in the stories, things like the interesting taxes conceived of over time. In one story there is mention of the Hearth Tax, a tax based on the number of hearths in a building. It made me think of the more recent British tax on televisions, a modern day sort of hearth. There is another story that mentioned window taxes, the result of which is windows that were bricked up.
What all of the stories have, of course, is the frozen river and the nature of the ice for that particular time. The ice is varied, smooth and hard, thin and dangerous, bumpy or consisting of large pieces frozen together. The characters are influenced by this weather phenomenom and some make life changes because of it.
This is one of the most interesting and fascinating books that I've ever read, and I know I will go back to it often.

From the time people started keeping records the Thames froze 40 times. This book is a collection of imagined vignettes from each one of those times.
There was something very calming and grounding in reading this book. The stories are more like snippets of life, just a short moment from someone's perspective.
As the weather here is getting hotter and hotter, it gave me some comfort to be transported, for just a little while, to someplace cold, alien and enchanting.

This book blew me away. I had read the reviews before ordering for our libraries and thought it looked interesting. So I placed a hold on it. When it came - I was a bit surprised. It is small - looks like a children's book.

Good things come in small packages. This book contains 40 vignettes about the Thames when it froze. Since we can't really know what happend in the 1142, this is a work of fiction. However, Humphreys has done her research well and this reads like history.

This is a book to savor. Read one or two stories at a time. Think about what we know about history and all the possibilities of cold and ice.

The Thames will probably never freeze again. However Helen Humphries has made the river freezing seem like something we would like to experience.

I will be talking about this book for some time to come.

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Book Report: It is a matter of historical record that the Thames, giant river and estuary that drains the heart of Southern England, has frozen solid forty times in the span of record-keeping that we possess. Author Humphreys sets about telling the story of these extraordinary events, one at a time, and in a very compressed and taut way, by giving us brief slices of the lives of people experiencing the once-in-a-lifetime event. Each of these stories is very, very short, and often accompanied by lovely historical illustrations of the Thames and of the Frost Fairs that took place on the mighty river.

My Review: This is a physically beautiful book. The paper is heavy matte-coated stock, perfect for the illustrations and the nature of the text. It's all too rare to find such a lovely match between subject and medium coming from a major US publishing house. I was pleasantly surprised by this.

I was a little less pleasantly impressed by the somewhat smug little Author's Note, in which Humphreys says that, due to the exigencies of global warming, she's trying with this set of stories to preserve “...the idea of ice {in} our consciousness.”

Oof.

One whole star off for hubris, and for the slightness of the edifice built in memoriam for the concept of ice. Much much more would be required to capture an essence of the vast power of ice. Enough to say that this book is meant to capture some of the experience of ice as a transformative force. Going that extra length to make it so global...well, that's just too far, too much, and too bad.

Perfect reading for the beginning of spring! Lyrically soft illustrations accompany Helen Humphreys' gorgeous prose in this book of short meditations on the Thames as it froze over the ages. My soul is filled with inspiration!

If I recall correctly, I added this book to my TBR list a couple of years ago. It was therefore something of a surprise when I started reading the book and realised that I either had never noticed or had forgotten what the structure of this book was.

Rather than a through narrative following a set of characters, The Frozen Thames is a series of vignettes with each being set at a different year when the winter was so cold that the river Thames froze over. Each of the forty different stories is perhaps three or four pages long, certainly not many were much longer, and so just give a glimpse of life at a particular moment in time. When you have forty or so short stories some will be stronger than others and that is definitely the case here, but what you do get is some fascinating glimpses of these particular moments in time.




To read more head to

http://www.theintrepidreader.com/2013/01/the-frozen-thames-by-helen-humphreys.html

I was a bit wary of this book, though I liked the idea behind it and I already liked Ms. Humphreys' writing. A book of short vignettes spanning 750 years is a difficult task, after all.

I did end up really enjoying this book. It's a quick, breezy read, the writing is good, and there's a lot of interesting information scattered throughout. The only trouble is the combining of more "straight facts" for reference vignettes and the extremely personable ones, or rather, making the facts ones seem more personable (which she usually accomplishes, though there are a few weaker sections).

There are some truly beautiful little bits of writing in this book, though, and the vast majority are based on documented events.