Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida

Rating: 8 out of 10
Summary: On the day of her father’s funeral, twenty-eight-year-old Clarissa Iverton discovers that he wasn’t her biological father after all. Her mother disappeared fourteen years earlier, and now Clarissa is alone and adrift. The one person she feels she can trust, her fiancé, Pankaj, has just revealed a terrible and life-changing secret to her. In the cycle of a day, all the truths in Clarissa’s world become myths and rumors, and she is catapulted out of the life she knew.

She finds her birth certificate, which leads her from New York to Helsinki, and then north of the Arctic Circle, to mystical Lapland, where she believes she’ll meet her real father. There, under the northern lights of a sunless winter, Clarissa comes to know the Sami, the indigenous population, and seeks out a local priest, the one man who may hold the key to her origins.

Along her travels she meets an elderly Sami healer named Anna Kristine, who has her own secrets, and a handsome young reindeer herder named Henrik, who accompanies Clarissa to a hotel made of ice. There she is confronted with the truth about her mother’s past and finally must make a decision about how—and where—to live the rest of her life. (Thanks, Barnes & Noble).

Commentary: I was a little iffy about this one in the beginning–it started off kind of slow, and I couldn’t sympathize very well with the protagonist. I even put it down for awhile to read Angel-Seeker by Sharon Shinn, but Northern Lights stuck in my head (such a cool title) and I came back around to it. It hit a certain point around the middle that I’m not going to give away, and everything just sort of fell into place and I was completely sucked in.

Very poetic, almost. Kind of reminded me a little bit of Imagism (William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, e.e. cummings), but it was very different at the same time. I could feel the cold when I was reading this.

Beautiful throughout. I will be picking up more from this author in the future. My advice is that yes, the beginning might seem a bit on the slow side, but stick with it and it’ll be worth it.

I’m putting this one under “World Fiction” just because the protagonist does so much traveling throughout, and moves through several different cultures.