For some reason, a few of my recent reads have featured midwives, and Animal Life fits the pattern. Dómhildur is a midwife in a Reykjavik hospital and comes from a long lines of midwives in her family. Closest to her, perhaps, was her childless great-aunt, now deceased but previously a midwife, whose mantle has settled on her shoulders.
Read MoreThe prologue of the novel, which is about nine pages in length, hits the reader from the very start with a different history of the start of the now-United States, the evolution of the native experience, and the unique modern day urban Indians, who struggle to self-identify in a world that often does not see them.
Read MoreAt the age of 22, main character Arnljótur Thórir, finds himself confronted by several unexpected accidents: the death of his mother after an auto accident on a slick Icelandic road and parenthood after a chance entanglement in his and his mother’s beloved greenhouse. Lobbi (one of Arnljótur’s various nicknames bestowed by his father) has a lifelong love of cultivating plants - no easy task in the harsh Icelandic climate.
Read MoreIceland in the 1960s was not exactly like my home country of America in the 1960s. A better comparison of Iceland in the ‘60s would be America in the ‘50s: a place where the role each person played was tantamount; women were to be wives falling in step behind their husband’s successes, and to be gay was to struggle to find a place in an unfriendly world, best managed through a loveless marriage to the opposite sex. Miss Iceland’s main character, Hekla, and her best friend, Jon John, each represent one half of those populations.
Read MoreHotel Silence takes place in Iceland for the novel's beginning and ending and sandwiched in the middle it takes place in an unnamed country that is emerging from a recent war. While it isn't possible to pinpoint a country for the largest segment of the book, in some ways it can represent anywhere that finds itself seeking to recover post-conflict. A place name is meaningless in a place struggling to redefine itself. What attracted me to this and other books by Ólafsdóttir is that is she an Icelandic writer.
Read MoreButterflies in November takes place in Iceland, initially in the capital city of Reykjavík and then along the southern to eastern leg of Iceland’s Ring Road. Having driven the entirety of Ring Road ourselves in Summer 2018, this novel did a great job evoking that journey and so is a must-read for anyone planning on taking that trip or wanting to reminisce!
Read More
