[title subtitle=”review: Marla Cantrell”][/title]
Frances, from Manhattan, is fresh out of college and on the heels of a breakup. To get away from her troubles she travels to Lofoten, a clutch of six small islands in the Norwegian Sea, just ninety-five miles north of the Arctic Circle. She has come to the Far North to work with an artist who paints using only the color yellow. It is summer, the time when the Norway sun shines twenty-four hours a day. The light illuminates everything, from Frances’ art to her broken heart, to her desire to be loved.
But her worries are small compared to those of seventeen-year-old Yasha Gregoriov, a Russian immigrant from Brighton Beach, who’s come to this northernmost part of the world to fulfill his father’s last wish to be buried here, at the top of the world.
Heartbroken, Yasha finds that Norway is exactly what he needs. It is a place of solitude when you need it, and of friendship when you least expect it. He takes command, hoping to pull off the funeral his father wanted, which is to be held at midnight so near the ocean Yasha worries that the coffin will soon be washed away. He remembers the conversations he had with his father while the two were working together in their bakery in New York. He remembers how many years his father waited for Yasha’s mother to come back to them, and how he never once stopped longing for her. When his heart was failing, all he wanted was to see her again, and when that proved impossible, he gave up hope.
It is an arrow in Yasha’s heart that his mother decides to show up for the funeral, and that she tries to mend their relationship after such a long absence.
Yasha crosses paths with Frances at his darkest hour, and in that time she becomes the light he’s been searching for. While he works his way through the grief of losing his father, he begins to believe that there is something good just beyond the horizon.
This is a story of loneliness and longing, and of hope and love. Both Yasha and Frances find out things about themselves that tie them to one another, and they discover that letting go is sometimes the only thing to do.
The author, Rebecca Dinerstein, started this book when she was in Norway on a fellowship from Yale. She talks about the eighteen-hour train ride from Oslo to Lofoten, and seeing those mountain-covered islands for the first time, ripped up by fjords, and how the sight of it caused her to never want to leave. What she loved was the pure air, and the culture of open doors and trust, and the national love of the outdoors.
Trained as a poet, Dinerstein excels as a writer. Her descriptions are beautiful and precise. And her characters are complex, often funny, and totally flawed. She says she’d been working on Yasha’s character for ten years. The time she spent certainly paid off. If you’re looking for a book to escape the heat of August, this is the one for you.
