Six Degrees of Separation - Wolfe Island to Girl with a Pearl Earring

Welcome to this month's edition of Six Degrees of Separation, which is a monthly meme hosted by Kate from Books Are My Favourite and Best.  The idea is to start with a specific book and make a series of links from one book to the next using whatever link you can find and see where you end up after six links. 

The book that we are starting with this month is Wolfe Island by Lucy Treloar, a book that I haven't yet read. I recently realised that  I actually have Salt Creek, this author's first book on my shelf. I was a bit surprised the other day to see that my husband had something against that book. No idea what, but it did appear as though it was being held at electric drill point. It must have paid the ransom though because it is now free to rest on the shelves no longer threatened!

I actually ended up doing two versions of this month's Six Degrees. The other one featured werewolves and dark fantasy but in the end I decided to go with an around the world feel.We start in Canada and end up in the Netherlands, but we do take the long way around.

So my first book is Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney which was a Costa prize winner for a first novel back in 2006. I read it years ago and like it without loving it. This was a book that made me feel cold just reading it. There  was lots of snow.

There was no snow in Christie Watson's Tiny Sunbirds Far Away because it was set in Nigeria. I did love this book, and it also won the Costa prize for a first novel in 2011.

For my next book I am sticking with an African theme and choosing the first book in The Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith which is set in Botswana. As an aside, I still love these early style covers in this series.

Another first book in a series featuring a lady detective is Cocaine Blues by Kerry Greenwood which is set in Melbourne in the 1920s. This features the divine Miss Phryne Fisher and the same applies to these styles of covers!

I chose to look for a link to the colour blue for my next connection which led me to The Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland. In this book we follow a painting of a girl through it's various owners. I've read a number of this authors books over the years and find them fascinating.

My final connection is another book about a girl in a painting is The Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier. As I was preparing this post I was contemplating how hard it would be for the publisher to repackage this book with a completely different cover.

Next month's starting book is Stasiland by Anna Funder and I really have no idea how I am going to get that chain started. Lucky I have a while to think about it!

Shows how little I know

I was a little surprised to hear that Stef Penney won the Costa Prize this week for The Tenderness of Wolves. Whilst it was an okay read, I wouldn't have thought it was a prize winner!

Shows how little I know really doesn't it!

The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney

As winter tightens its grip on the isolated settlement of Canada’s Dove River in 1867, a man is brutally murdered and a 17-year-old boy disappears. Tracks leaving the dead man’s cabin head north toward the forest and the tundra beyond.

In the wake of such violence, people are drawn to the township—journalists, Hudson Bay Company men, trappers, traders—but do they want to solve the crime or exploit it? One-by-one the assembled searchers set out from Dove River, pursuing the tracks across a desolate landscape home only to wild animals, madmen, and fugitives, variously seeking a murderer, a son, two missing sisters, a forgotten Native culture, and a fortune in stolen furs.

In an astonishingly assured debut, Stef Penney weaves adventure, suspense, revelation, and humour into a gripping historical tale, an exhilarating thriller, a keen murder mystery, and ultimately, with the sheer scope and quality of her storytelling, one of the best books of the year.

This book is being sold in the bookstores here with a "Good Reading Guarantee", and that if you didn't enjoy it you could get your money back. If I had of bought it, for the first couple of hundred pages I would have been seriously considered taking advantage of that guarantee. It's not that it wasn't a good read, because it was...eventually. Maybe it was just the way that I was feeling, but every time I opened this book and read a few pages I just wanted to go to sleep. Once I got past a couple of hundred pages it was okay, and I no longer felt the need to sleep through the book but it did take me a very long time to get to that point.

Part of the issue for me was the sheer number of characters there were and how the action followed so many of them. We started out with the people who lived in the town of Dove River, particularly those who were directly affected by the murder of a French trapper. Then, the chief investigators enter the story - a couple of the upstanding gentlemen from the next town over, plus several men from the Hudson Bay Trading Company. Then a couple of other people vaguely connected to the case come into town as well. And then, everyone starts leaving again, in groups of ones and twos, ostensibly to try and track down the young boy who may or may not have killed the trapper. No one knows why he would do this, but still he has disappeared and that would make him appear guilty.

As many of the characters leave Dove River, they enter the wilderness in the middle of winter making travelling hazardous and drawing unlikely travelling companions closer together. Eventually the travellers arrive at a small religious settlement, where yet more characters and subplots are introduced to the book, and then again when they travel on to a small company outpost a little further on.

With the narrative following all the different characters as they arrive in Dove River and then leave in groups of two or three, the story switched too many times even within single chapters.

In the end this was an okay read. I think that there were probably a couple too many strands of the story than there really needed to be and therefore it was difficult to draw them all back into a cohesive finish, but there was certainly a good story to be told in there, and definitely signs of a good writer.

Rating 3.5/5


Other Bloggers Thoughts:

Katrina's Reads
In Spring it is the Dawn
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