Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida

(hb; 2007)

From the inside flap:

“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 a drift. 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.”


Review:

Northern is an offbeat, melancholic and delightful book. What thrilled me the most about Lights is not so much what Vida wrote, but what she didn’t write -- that is not to say that she does not bring this story to life with vivid images and effective understatement. Readers who require their authors to spell everything out for them should probably avoid it; readers who do not need to be spoon-fed their entertainment should check it out.

Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell

(hb; 2005: non-fiction)

From the inside flap:

“… Blink is a book about how we think without thinking, about choices that seem to be made in an instant – in a blink of an eye – that actually aren’t as simple as they seem. Why are some people brilliant decision makers, while others are consistently inept? Why do some people follow their instincts and win, while others end up stumbling into error? How do our brains really work – in the office, in the classroom, in the kitchen, and in the bedroom? And why are the best decisions often those that are impossible to explain to others?

“In Blink we meet the psychologist who has learned to predict whether a marriage will last, based on a few minutes of observing a couple; the tennis coach who knows when a player will double-fault before the racket even makes contact with the ball; the antiquities experts who recognize a fake at a glance. Here, too, are great failures of ‘blink’: the election of Warren Harding; the New Coke; and the shooting of Amadou Diallo by police. Blink reveals that great decision makers aren’t those who process the most information or spend the most time deliberating, but those who have perfected the art of ‘thin-slicing’ – filtering the very few factors that matter from an overwhelming number of variables.”

Review:

Life-changing book about not only trusting one’s gut instincts, but being aware of one’s surroundings – and of the subconscious information that's making itself available to us, if we’re open to it: we simply have to read whatever signs are unveiled to us.

Gladwell backs his exciting ideas with scientific data, psychology and historic events, making for a great read, possibly one of my all-time favorite non-fiction books.

Pick it up, already!

Mistress of the Art of Death, by Ariana Franklin

(hb; 2007: first book in the A Mistress of the Art of Death series)

From the inside flap:

"In medieval Cambridge, four children have been murdered. The Catholic townsfolk blame their Jewish neighbors, so to save them from the rioting mob, the Cambridge Jews are placed under the protection of the king. Henry II is no friend of the Jews -- or anyone, really -- but he believes in law and order, and he desperately needs the taxes he receives from Jewish merchants. Hoping scientific investigation will help catch the true killer, Henry calls on his cousin, the King of Sicily -- whose subjects include the best medical experts in Europe -- and asks for his finest 'master of the art of death,' the earliest form of medical examiner. The Italian doctor chosen for the task is a young prodigy from the University of Salerno, an expert in the science of anatomy and the art of detection. But her name is Adelia; the king has been sent a 'mistress of the art of death.'

"In a backward and superstitious country like England, Adelia faces danger at every turn. As she examines the victimcs and retraces their last steps, she must conceal her true identity in order to avoid accusations of witchcraft. Along the way, she's assisted by one of the king's tax collectors, Sir Rowley Picot, a man with a personal stake in the investigation. A former Crusader knight, Rowley may be a needed friend -- or the fiend for whom they are searching. As Adelia's investigation takes her along Cambridge's shadowy river paths, and behind the closed doors of its churches and nunneries, the hunt intensifies and the killer prepares to strike again..."

Review:

Riveting Medieval mystery, with modern touches and themes -- there's a passage or two that's easily applicable to America today -- and easy-to-care-about characters.

The killer isn't easy to suss out, there's a bonanza of fascinating period information, and the finish leaves room for future Adelia-based novels, while providing a satisfactory wrap-up to this particular tale.

Highly recommended, this!

Followed by The Serpent's Tale.