Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name - Vendela Vida

First of all, has anyone been paying attention to Tropical Storm Fay? Well it's lingering around my house and won't stop dumping rain and huge wind gusts on us. My boyfriend and I went to Key Largo last weekend to celebrate his birthday and were evacuated on Sunday morning because of the impending storm. Fay has since made her way north and is hovering a bit too close to my territory.

That said, I had some extra reading time today because we had a half hurricane day - and we have another full day tomorrow! Here's to more reading time (maybe).

Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name was a fascinating look at Lapland, the area north of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. Vendela Vida, who won the Kate Chopin Award for this novel, spent three years and several trips to the icy land to write the book. It begins with the death of Clarissa Iverton's beloved father. Shortly after his funeral, she finds out that he was not her biological father after all, and that her fiance kept that secret from her for years. Clarissa also has not seen her mother in over a decade, and knowing that her mother was once in Lapland, sets out to find her biological father. In the process, she meets some nice Sami folks, who actually know more about her than she thinks in the beginning.

It is there, on the other side of the world, that she discovers she is pregnant with her fiance's child. But she doesn't necessarily want to return to him. After figuring out that her mother was raped and that she is living on this cold, dark side of the world, she tracks her down - only to realize her mother has no interest in being a parent, and does not care that Clarissa is about to be one herself.

This is a devastating story of family; a nice, intelligent woman discovers her whole life has been a lie and that her fiance knew it all along, and that her mother does not care about her, and that she is the product of a brutal rape. It was a very intriguing story, a real page-turner, but the ending was quite anticlimactic and not what I expected. Still, it is worth the read.