Title: Wolf Winter Author: Cecilia Ekbäck
Published: January 27, 2015
Genre(s): Historical Fiction
Page Count: 376
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Swedish Lapland, 1717. Maija, her husband Paavo and her daughters Frederika and Dorotea arrive from their native Finland, hoping to forget the traumas of their past and put down new roots in this harsh but beautiful land. Above them looms Blackåsen, a mountain whose foreboding presence looms over the valley and whose dark history seems to haunt the lives of those who live in its shadow.
While herding the family's goats on the mountain, Frederika happens upon the mutilated body of one of their neighbors, Eriksson. The death is dismissed as a wolf attack, but Maija feels certain that the wounds could only have been inflicted by another man. Compelled to investigate despite her neighbors' strange disinterest in the death and the fate of Eriksson's widow, Maija is drawn into the dark history of tragedies and betrayals that have taken place on Blackåsen. Young Frederika finds herself pulled towards the mountain as well, feeling something none of the adults around her seem to notice.
As the seasons change, and the "wolf winter," the harshest winter in memory, descends upon the settlers, Paavo travels to find work, and Maija finds herself struggling for her family's survival in this land of winter-long darkness. As the snow gathers, the settlers' secrets are increasingly laid bare. Scarce resources and the never-ending darkness force them to come together, but Maija, not knowing who to trust and who may betray her, is determined to find the answers for herself. Soon, Maija discovers the true cost of survival under the mountain, and what it will take to make it to spring.
In her spellbinding debut novel, Cecilia Ekbäck weaves a story of murder, survival, and old magic. Wolf Winter bring the best of historical fiction and a traditional mystery, creating a suspenseful tale set in early 18th century Swedish Lapland. All this in addition to the author’s gloriously atmospheric prose is a winning combination.
“Wolf Winter,” she said, her voice small. “I wanted to ask about it. You know, what it is.”
He was silent for a long time. “It’s the kind of winter that will remind us we are mortal,” he said. “Mortal and alone.”
In the beginning of the book, two young girls, Frederika and Dorotea, come across the body of a dead man. They’ve only been in Sweden for four days—having recently migrated from their homeland of Finland. As winter sets in, the girls’ mother, Maija sets out to uncover the identity of the murderer. But beneath the foreboding shadow of Blackåsen mountain, the little community is hiding many secrets, and the spirits of the native Laplanders might have more insidious designs for the settlers. Over the course of the long, harsh winter, everyone is shaken, and everything people believe to be true is changed.
I picked up Wolf Winter because the premise was one I knew I couldn’t miss—homesteaders in 1717 Swedish Lapland? Absolutely. Yet while Ekbäck’s initial concept is excellent and makes the book worth reading just for its own merit, I truly think it’s the author’s prose that makes Wolf Winter so remarkable. The writing in this book is what brings to life the dark, haunting grimmness of this place Maija and her daughters find themselves in. The hints of sorcery, the knowledge that one of their neighbors is a murderer, the bitter weather—those are great plot points, but the prose is what makes them stand out so well. Ekbäck’s descriptions of weather, in particular, are gorgeous and brilliantly evocative.
Ekbäck describes the rain:
Heaven opened. A wall of water poured out and down. The world dissolved into dreary blocks of color. The rain drummed against the roof of the house.
Ekbäck describes the fall:
Late autumn this year had violence in her hair, angry crimson, orange, and yellow. The trees wrestled to free themselves of their cloaks, crumpled up their old leaves and threw them straight out into the strong wind rather than just let them fall to the ground. Dry leaves ran across the yard with the crackle of fire.
And Ekbäck describes the snow:
At first there are only single flakes falling from a solid sky onto Blackåsen—one, then a couple more. The mountain parries them. As if considering not allowing things to proceed. With spruce and pine, it blocks the snowflakes from reaching the ground. By the river it swallows them with water. Over the lake they are so moist, they seem like sheer mist.
And so on and so forth. Honestly, Wolf Winter is worth reading just for its prose.
But there are definitely other reasons to give this book a try. The community dynamics and relationships, for instance. There are three major “groups” of people in this book. First you have the Lapps, natives who herd reindeer and come down from the mountain during the coldest months. There are the settlers, who live in homesteads spread out around the base of the mountain. Lastly, there are those who live in town, traders and the like, and most notably, the priest, who is one of several main characters in Wolf Winter. Ekbäck gives all three groups dimension and nuance, though as Maija and her elder daughter Frederika are, for the most part, the book’s protagonists, and the murder takes place within the micro-community of the settlers, that is where much of the book’s focus lies. In any case, I was very much taken with the way this book slowly unraveled the trust and dependence these people had in each other, caused by the murder of one of their own and a nosy foreign woman’s pryings.
The mystery in Wolf Winter is rewarding and intricate, but also important in this novel is mere survival. 75% of the book takes place over the course of one winter (an unusually harsh one, at that), and even while Maija is reeling from her discoveries, she’s also doing her best just to survive. The darkness and the cold are nearly palpable spiritual entities themselves in the text, and they wear down on the settlers of Blackåsen, winnowing out the weak, as it were.
It was like Nils had said, about the little lake on the mountain that had been turned into marsh and the large one that had remained a lake. A being was either strong enough to hold their ground or they became small and bottomless and started feeding on themselves. They turned into something they never saw coming. Something they never intended.
This book, overall, is richly haunting. The alpine setting is suffused with a sense of misgivings and malignancy, and the cross-genre historical/suspense plot is moves languidly into darkness. Wolf Winter is an astonishingly atmospheric novel, and for readers who like snow or mysteries or history, it’s certainly a book to check out. Cecilia Ekbäck had done marvelous work here, and I truly hope this won’t be the last I read from her.
