Cecilia Ekbäck

The best version of this book is a historical fiction murder mystery. It still wouldn’t really work for me, it’s a little grim and dark for my tastes, but it would work better. In 1717, a Finnish family, Paavo, Maija, and their daughters Frederika and Dorotea, arrive as settlers in Swedish Lapland (as I remember from reading Stolen a couple months back, this is not the correct term…the people are Sami and the region is Sapmi, but Lapps/Lapland are the terms the characters would have used). Shortly after their arrival, the girls find a murdered man in a clearing. The plot centers around the puzzle of his death, which resonates not just among the family, but among the fellow homesteaders on Blackasen mountain, the Sami people who range through the area in the winter, and the religious authority in the area, a priest who had once been a close friend of the King but has wound up in an isolated, frigid hamlet. This all is executed proficiently enough, with Ekback’s depiction of the tensions that can arise in the wilderness during the endless night and cold of an Arctic winter, particularly after a gruesome death, feeling very real. But the novel also features a supernatural element, and this was where it faltered for me. It was well-written enough, but it doesn’t really go anywhere, and I wished she’d either excised it or leaned into the magical realism of it all harder. Perhaps if it had been cut, it would have made room for a richer discussion of the political situation in Sweden at the time, which was a major factor in the plot but was never really appropriately explained in the text. I appreciated the character work that Ekback pulled off, I definitely got invested in all of the protagonists and their various plights. Like I said, the overall grimness of tone (which is relatively common in Scandinavian literature) didn’t really work for me, nor did the pacing, with the plot being resolved very quickly at the very end.… (altro)

I can't make up my mind about this. As an evocation of life in an isolated 18th century community of far-flung homesteads in northern Sweden it's quite wonderful. The sheer drudgery of keeping alive in the long dark days of winter; the isolation; the fear of beasts and evil spirits: in fact the pervasiveness and absolute acceptance of a spirit world was involvingly brought to life.

Maija, her husband Paavo, her daughters Frederika and Dorotea move into this world from a coastal community. Their battle to survive in a very different life is coloured when they come across a man's body, ripped asunder by ..... well, actually, it must have been by man, not an animal of. This book then is a murder mystery.

Whilst I continued to relish the description of such an alien life, I began to find the mystery and the people involved in it increasingly hard to untangle. Maija and her family, and the community's priest are richly sketched (I wrote 'painted', but this word suggests colours that form no part of this bleak world) . I found it hard to get into the mindset of utterly believing in the overwhelming presence of a spirit life.

I read on, and I read on willingly, because I relished the descriptions. I didn't really mind that the story to some extent passed me by. Four stars or three? Three for story, up to 5 for evocative language.… (altro)

The author does a wonderful job of creating atmosphere. The story takes place in the deep dark coldest winter in memory (a wolf winter) in Swedish Lapland in 1717. I was surprised not to see huge snow drifts outside when I stopped reading. The book is also very creepy and suspenseful.There is a murder mystery as part of the plot. The pacing is very slow, so if you aren't a patient reader this book is not for you. There is some information in the back of the book in the Author's Note which I recommend reading first, unless you are very well versed in the politics and religion of Scandinavia in the 1700s.… (altro)