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A review by nina_reads_books
Cold Coast by Robyn Mundy
4.0
Cold Coast by Robyn Mundy is inspired by the real life story of a young widow Wanny Woldstad, who in 1932 convinces trapper Anders Sæterdal to let her become his trapping partner for a season in Svalbard, Norway. Trapping was a wholly male domain and Wanny as the first woman to ever want to do it has to fight hard to prove her worth. Together they hunt polar bears and Arctic fox during a long dark winter.
This was an entirely different read for me. Trapping on remote land in Norway with the descriptions of the landscape the animals and the sheer hard work to survive - not something I've ever read about before but it really held my attention.
My favourite aspect of the book was that the chapters about Wanny and Anders were interspersed with chapters about a female fox and her female kit who is the runt of the litter. These chapters told from an animal’s perspective reminded me of The Octopus and I and Robbie Arnott's books The Rain Heron and Flames. They were little peaks into an animal’s thoughts as they lived and survived in the wild landscape alongside the ever present threat of the trappers.
I found this book very easy to read and very evocative of the place (and time) in which it was set. However, you cannot escape the fact that the novel centres on a pair of trappers and the animals they kill for their meat or fur. It was though set in the 1930s and so is being true to that time period and echoes the real life of Wanny Woldstad. I would just caution that if you think descriptions of animals being killed in this way would bother you I'd avoid the book. While the descriptions are not particularly gruesome they are faithful to the reality of a trapper.
I enjoyed this as a very different type of historical fiction to one I’d normally pick up.
Thank you so much to @ultimopress for my #gifted copy of Cold Coast.
This was an entirely different read for me. Trapping on remote land in Norway with the descriptions of the landscape the animals and the sheer hard work to survive - not something I've ever read about before but it really held my attention.
My favourite aspect of the book was that the chapters about Wanny and Anders were interspersed with chapters about a female fox and her female kit who is the runt of the litter. These chapters told from an animal’s perspective reminded me of The Octopus and I and Robbie Arnott's books The Rain Heron and Flames. They were little peaks into an animal’s thoughts as they lived and survived in the wild landscape alongside the ever present threat of the trappers.
I found this book very easy to read and very evocative of the place (and time) in which it was set. However, you cannot escape the fact that the novel centres on a pair of trappers and the animals they kill for their meat or fur. It was though set in the 1930s and so is being true to that time period and echoes the real life of Wanny Woldstad. I would just caution that if you think descriptions of animals being killed in this way would bother you I'd avoid the book. While the descriptions are not particularly gruesome they are faithful to the reality of a trapper.
I enjoyed this as a very different type of historical fiction to one I’d normally pick up.
Thank you so much to @ultimopress for my #gifted copy of Cold Coast.