Boy meets girl on this surreal journey from New York City to Norway’s remote Lofoten Islands
Rebecca Dinerstein’s debut novel follows the lives of two young adults from New York City to the Lofoten Islands in Norway. Frances is a new college graduate awarded an artist’s residency at a Viking museum in the Arctic archipelago, while Yasha wants to bury his father “at the top of the world” but finds his plans compromised by permafrost and transport problems. Yasha was born in Moscow and is followed to the islands by his Russian mother– a piano player with heaving cleavage and high heels – while Frances is fleeing parents who seem to have been borrowed from a Woody Allen film. Boy, inevitably, meets girl. The cover recommendation from Jonathan Safran Foer tells you exactly what to expect: self-consciously quirky fiction fresh from an MFA at NYU.
If you can overlook the stereotypes, the premise is fun. Before his father died, he and Yasha were running the Gregoriov Bakery in Brighton beach. Across town, Frances’s father, a failed doctor turned medical illustrator who was fat as a child and now lives on ketchup, is separating from her mother, an interior designer who eats only apples, and her sister, Sarah, is rebelling by marrying a California computer programmer who isn’t even Jewish. Meanwhile, on the Lofoten Islands, Norwegians drink too much and go slightly mad under the midnight sun.
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