Book Thirtyfive: Icelander

Icelander, Dustin Long



I am guilty of picking this book by its cover. But seriously, can you blame me for that? The back cover also boasts that it is a sort-of-mystery, which has become my unofficial theme for this year of books, so I doubly couldn't resist. Once I got it home and opened it, I realized that it's a novel with footnotes and my first thought was, "Ugh, pretentious footnotes." And then I noticed that it's published by McSweeney's and I got super worried. However, once I got about 20 pages in I was really into it. I can't even begin to summarize the plot, not even in a nutshell, but I will say that it involves the murder of a writer named Shirley MacGuffin (get it?); an underground kingdom called Vanaheim; Our Heroine, the mostly-narrator of the story and the daughter of Emily Bean who was a famed detective about whom the wildly popular Memoirs of Emily Bean were written; foxes; a Fenris Dachshund; steam tunnels; and another uber-narrator, responsible for some snarky footnotes and who, as the book wore on, I began see as highly unreliable.