Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name: A Novel

Life is never clear and choices don't make sense- unless you're in a book where the author lets you stumble into thoughts and feelings that end up making sense when you don't want them to. A heart-wrenching story of the avoidance of being a victim and acceptance of violence - it has left me trying to find another ending. Very thought provoking. I started the book and couldn't put it down until I finished it. I have to ditto -'liked it against my will' review. Highly recommend.

The writing here is just gorgeous, but never at the expense of plot. I read Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name in a few short days, and yet I think of it again and again. I will definitely look forward to reading more of Vida's work.

Thanks to this book, I didn't leave my house all day one Saturday. "Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name" is simply an incredibly well-told, well-conceived story. The story Ms. Vida has created - of a 29-year-old woman's unexpected journey to north Finland and into her own past - is so quirky and original in its setting and twists, yet completely believable in its main character's superhuman attempt to connect with her matronage and sense of humanity. This is an artful, powerfully imagined book. Cheers to Ms. Vida for reminding us of how good a novel can be.

Vendela Vida's second novel, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, tells the haunting story of Clarissa Iverton's discovery that her recently-deceased father was not the man whose name appears on her birth certificate, and her subsequent search for her biological father in Lapland. It is here that she becomes acquainted with indigenous people known as the Sami, and comes to term with the past of her mother, who abandons her when she is fourteen. When Clarissa plans to meet her mother at the store and is fifteen minutes late, she is informed by the woman at the counter that her mother has left because she "got tired of waiting." Vida's prose is simple and matter-of-fact as her narrator grapples with issues of identity, writing that "When you believe anyone could be your mother, you begin to believe anyone could be your brother, your lover, your son." Her distanced perspective captures perfectly the sense of loss and anger plaguing the narrator, and her detachment not only to her home but also to the people around her. She writes, "Disappearing is nothing. I learned this from my mother," a line which not only echoes her willingness to take this journey without so much as notifying anyone of where she will be, but also reflects the narrator's eventual coming to terms with her mother's disappearance. Sprinkled throughout this novel are also vivid descriptions ("Outside my window, dusk was already settling in like a bruise") and dry wit to offset the darker moments. Toward the beginning of the novel when Clarissa is in New York and in a fight with her fiancée, she blocks her bedroom door with her hamper and when he asks her about it, she responds, "To hamper you." What is perhaps most remarkable about this novel is Vida's ability to fully immerse her readers in the mystical world of Lapland as she shows us everything from reindeer herding to a hotel made entirely of ice. Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name is a moving page-turner that I enthusiastically recommend.

Last night I began this book at 8:00 p.m. and didn't put it down until I had read the last word. The writing is eloquent and the story is deeply compelling. I thought about the book all day today, and the questions it raises about the connection of the past to the present and about identity. I highly recommend this book.