"A fascinating on-the-ground investigation of how a very different, very ancient culture understands, lives with, and trains its vital animals. Ms. Brown's book is unique. I know of no other book remotely like it."

"The best journeys go two ways: out, into the unknown, and in, to what we might have known all along. Nancy Marie Brown's absorbing tale of looking for horses in Iceland is that kind of odyssey. Like the ancient legends she recounts, hers is rich and transporting, a true saga."

"Nancy Marie Brown's fascinating book reminds us that the pursuit of happiness often leads down strange paths ... in her case, through the intracacies of the Icelandic horse-breeding culture and the mists of mythology and ancient tales. Her language is precise and unsentimental, filled with the startling directness of the Icelandic sagas themselves. This is a wonderful book, a can't-put-down read about loss and healing, joy and discovery."

"Journeying across Iceland, Nancy Marie Brown makes vivid the coastlines and lava fields, the contemporary horse-breeding families and the great Sagas that continue to inform their lives. Part memoir, part cultural history, this book takes readers on a unique adventure for which Brown is a knowledgeable and trustworthy guide."

"A wonderful tale of a woman's search for a good Icelandic horse that leads directly to self-discovery. Nancy Marie Brown has woven memoir, adventure, Icelandic sagas, and travelogue into a book that will delight even those who don't find joy on horseback."

"Like two other writers in our literature, Maxine Kumin and Joy Harjo, Nancy Marie Brown is passionate about her glittering, great animals, who remain sufficiently large in the human imagination to reach toward the sacred status they held in the ancient Icelandic sagas. This is a compelling quest-story, a journey into a woman's symbolic and actual geography, in which the starkly stunning land itself is a living being, and entirely alive in these pages. Brown writes as though she were not a visitor, but rather a native of Iceland, reborn in another century. You could almost believe that Odin and Thor helped Brown to pick her horses -- but finally, this book is about how people make decisions, take responsibility for choices, and come to know their own minds."

"A wonderful book, inter-weaving the horses, the author and her life, Iceland, the sagas, Icelanders . . . like finding someone writing about the place where I grew up in a way that is particularly accurate and memory evoking."

"Who among us has never longed to gallop away from the tragedies and responsibilities of our lives on the back of a beautiful, swift-moving horse? With humor and honesty, Nancy Marie Brown had written an enchanting, lyrical book about her search for the perfect Icelandic horse, her symbol of freedom and courage."