This novel checked a lot of boxes for me. It's set in the Arctic, specifically Svalbard, the far north of Norway in the Arctic Circle. It has beautiful setting descriptions and insight to the region while keeping the descriptions a part of the story. It's historical fiction about a woman, Wanny Woldstad, who was the first female trapper in the 1930s.

Overall, this worked for me. Yes, the descriptions of hunting and trapping were a bit disturbing to a modern mind who doesn't believe in killing animals for their fur. But the author does a good job of also creating a story around the animals, focusing on foxes, that somehow both humanizes them and shows the cruelty of their own lives as hunters. Kind of a "circle of life" feeling.

I liked that the author gets into the relationship between Wanny and her trapping partner, Anders, and what it would have been like for a man and woman to attempt this together. And I liked how she showed the hardships of trapping and the climate. Mainly, I enjoyed that she did all of the above without becoming overly dramatic. This is a quiet book where the vast scenery really takes center stage, above human or animal drama.

At times, though, I got a little bored and wanted something more - I'm not even sure what. If the topic and setting interests you, I think there is enough here to make reading this worth your while, but otherwise I think it's ok to prioritize a different book. ( )

Just last week I was toying with the idea of joining Marina Sofia in her December reading project 'Russians in the Snow' because I thought that settings in snowy wastes would be consoling in the extreme heat of an Australian summer. Little did I know that within a day or two I would be reading a book that sent a chill down my spine, and not just because it's set in the polar region of Norway!

Mundy is brilliant at capturing the sensory immediacy of her characters' environment. She knows it well from her own experience in wild places. Her first novel The Nature of Ice was set in Antarctica where she has wintered and summered; and she has worked seasonally in Svalbard, Greenland, Antarctica, the Norwegian Coast and wild Scotland as a ship-based tour guide. This is the moment when it is too late for Wanny to change her mind:

The clanging of the anchor chain reverberates across the water to the shoreline where she stands beside Sæterdal. Sjefen, Chief, the men call him. They watch as the boat swings out, three warbling blasts to signal farewell. A year before they will see another ship. A year away from those she holds most dear. She draws herself firm, raises her arm, imagining how, from out there, she and he are two stick figures, barely human, marooned in frozen vastness.

When the ship motors from view, too late to change her mind, a man's voice comes to her as sharply as the wind that shimmies down the mountain and knocks a fist between her shoulder blades. (p.29)

Summer is making a belated start here in Victoria, so it was comforting to read this novel under the warmth of the doona, but Cold Coast is not a book to read at bedtime because the narrative tension is constant. It is not just foxes that break into the hut in search of food, bears do it too, and neither Sæterdal nor Wanny can relax their scrutiny of the landscape for long. Every venture means risk, and there are heart-stopping moments when survival is touch and go, not least because they can rarely trust the ice beneath their feet.

Their New year trip to Fuglefjell has been delayed thanks to a second inscrutable week of heavy snow, then showers of rain, then freeze and hail, the only constant a fierceness of wind which jams new rafts of ice and logs of driftwood up along the shoreline. Out in the fjord, bergs locked in the sea split and topple, issuing a booming thunder and opening up the ice until the gash refreezes. When snowdrift eases enough to see out the back door, to make headway on skis beyond the Signal, they slip and slither on patches of black ice. Their dogs slide on their haunches in a knot of harnesses, the sledge toppling when it hits the snow. Wanny loses count of the trigger locks she pulls apart, the wooden pieces doused with rain then frozen in place, all along the trap line. She struggles physically and mentally at the thought of twenty traps — the kilograms of stone to be offloaded, each trap cleared of snow before it can be rebaited, the aching effort of gingerly reloading thirty, forty kilograms of stone back onto a frame... (p.147)

Mundy does not shirk the confronting issue of hunting and trapping in this fragile environment. Indeed, this novel is a powerful argument for why such places should be protected.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/12/07/cold-coast-by-robyn-mundy/ ( )