So, this is a murder mystery type book set in Iceland (and written by an Icelandic person) and I listened to it as an audiobook. When I first heard the Icelandic narrator’s voice I thought it was a lovely sounding voice, and good for this book as he would be able to properly pronounce the Icelandic character and place names. This was true, however, I found the cadence of his speech to be slightly odd for English expressions and he often seemed to put the emphasis in the ‘wrong’ place. This is one thing that made the story slightly hard to follow for me. Also, the beginnings of the chapters gave dates and since I never really pay that much attention to numbers (that side of my brain is overshadowed by my creative side!) I was vaguely worried that the plot was jumping about in time but I wasn’t keeping up properly with when things were happening. I’m also not good at remembering whose names refer to whom, even when they are names that I’m familiar with, so I was constantly lost about who was being talked about now (the book went off on lots of tangents with different people’s back stories). I think maybe if I’d read it rather than listened I might have followed the plot better – then I could go back and check dates and names when I got confused which is too hard to do when listening to an audiobook, especially as I usually listen when out running.
I did kind of get the ending, and things did start to make more sense as they went along. I quite liked the main character of Ari, a young recently qualified police officer newly arrived at the remote Northern Icelandic town where the story is set as he battles with feelings of isolation and claustrophobia in the small town cut off from the rest of the country during the winter by the impassible mountain roads which surround it. I’ll probably not bother reading any more books by this author though.
Sarah Wray Writer 