In The Emma McChesney Stories, Edna Ferber staked out her claim as a delineator of American character; and in Show Boat she gave us one of the most appealing romances of the stage. Thereafter, in novels like Cimarron and Giant, she has written of the big operator, the limitless and often unscrupulous development of our natural resources, and the corrupting effect of power and wealth upon the individual. In Ice Palace … she has moved her setting to Alaska, our last frontier, and again she is writing about big strapping men…. (pp. 78, 80)

[The novel] reads to me like an old Morality…. The history of Seward's Purchase, the story of the early reckless days, of the potential locked in these vast northlands have been carefully built into the novel, but the pity of it is that by her process of overenlargement, Miss Ferber makes the picture seem less than believable.

Part of the trouble is traceable to her extravagant phrasing. I am prepared to believe that everything in Alaska is larger than life, except human nature, which I suspect must be pretty much the same there as it is here. Yet in phrases like these the author does less than justice to her people: "Oscar's little eyes narrowed to slits";… "tossing the amber stuff down their throats with one quick backward jerk of the head"; "Sid Kleet's steely voice cut the tension";… "His lethal gaze searched the crowd, passionless and coldly menacing as the eye of a Colt .38." Phrases like these are as subtle as brass knuckles. Apart from such theatricality, the virtue of this book is the fact that Miss Ferber cares deeply about the future both of Alaska and of mankind. (p. 80)