‘Compared to you Hekla, who are the daughter of volcano and the Arctic sea, I am the daughter of hillock and heath‘.

All I know about Iceland, really, can be summed up in a few words: Bjork, Olympic Games and cold… Thus, I literary jumped at the opportunity to read a book by Icelanding author set in Iceland and about Iceland life. Thanks to Netgalley for this opportunity.

Miss Iceland is a Pandora Box. The quiky cover and beauty pageant reminicent title are icy and whindy misleading. They are completely misleading. There is nothing even remotely cheesy and sugarflossy about this book… except may be the deserts the heroine brings from work for her friend and canned peaches (the epitome of fruit-eating) they seem to be eating at any opportunity.

This book is about writing. It is about a gril named after volcano (instead of being named after eagle as her mother wanted) wanting to write against all ods, wanting to become a full-fledge author in the country ruled by men, where any writing can only come from under manhandled quill.

‘Men are born poets. By the time their confirmation, they’ve taken on the inescapable role of being geniuses. It doesn’t matter whether they write books or not. Women, on the other hand, grapple with puberty and have babies, which prevents them from being able to write’.

Helka, the main heroine, moves from her small village to Reykjavik looking for better opportunity anf for more space literal and surreal to write. She is not alone. She has two best friends with her: male and female. They are as differnt as chalk and cheese but they love Hekla and want the best for her.

Her girlfriend dabbles in writing herself. She writes diary to escape the mudane routine of: babies, boiled potatos and curtains.

‘It can take as much as six, seven pages for the light to come up in here (sun).’

‘I decided to stop writing in the diary. I’ve packed away my wings’.

Her other friend is a gay man who struggles to fit in and to find himself in the male-dominated homophobic world of lies and deceptions.

‘Then I tell him. That I write… At that moment I’m holding the baton and tell the world it can be born. In return the most handsome boy in Dalir told me that he loved boys… We kept each other’s secrets. We were equal‘.

‘We’re two of a kind, Hekla. Neither of us is at home anywhere’.

But Hekla writes. She defies society’s norms. When she moves in with her boyfriend (poet) she hides her writing from her man. Eventually poet can’t write as he has nothing to say but Hekla gives birth to one story after another.

Hekla and Jon John (gay friend) escape the capital, the cold and long nights looking for ways to be themselves only to… well, you have to read the book to find out.

‘In my dream world the most important things would be: a sheet of paper, fountain pen and a male body. When we’ve finished making love, he’s welcome to ask if he can refill the fountain pen with ink for me’.

I loved the book. I loved the poetic voice and numerous passages that spoke to me directly. Thus, so many quotes in this review. I could identify with Hekla on many levels. I could see what she saw and feel what she felt.

I enjoyed her journey of self-discovery. However, it was cut short with and left reader with an open ending.

Translator did a great job bringing Icelandic Language novel to English Language readers.

Five stars from me.

Please do not judge this novel by the pinkish cute cover. The title and the cover are all meant as an irony to the women’s condition in the 1960’ Iceland, where they were expected only to look good and respond positively to the advances of men.

Hotel Silence was the first novel that I’ve read by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir and it was very different (review here). There, the narrator was a man impoverished by loss who tries to escape life in a country torn by war while here, the main character is an independent woman trying to find her way in the capital of Iceland.

Hekla, a young woman aptly named after a volcano, leaves Dalir, a remote part of Iceland to become a writer in Reykjavik. Armed with wit, talent, a manuscript and a typewriter, she has to face a world ruled by straight men who mock her dreams. She is constantly harassed by men for her good looks and invited to participate in a beauty pageant and finds no support from other writers, not even from her boyfriend, also an aspiring poet. She moves together with her best friend Jón John, a gay man who also struggles to find his place in the world and is rejected by society. The trio of misfits is completed by Isey, a married young woman, also a writer, who finds life as a dutiful wife and mother very hard to bear. Living in a basement with no light gives Isey no hope for the future as she sinks deeper in despair and fear of having too many children.

The writing is not too complex, I admit, but it was moving and engaging, I did not feel the time passing while reading.

The ending left me a bit deflated and perplexed but maybe it was the only way it could have ended at that time. As a new island was forming due to a volcanic eruption, it made me think that change was coming although not soon enough.

Thanks to Netgalley and Grove Atlantic for providing me with a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

4 stars
In the year 1963, Hekla an aspiring writer leaves her home, in the remote district of Dalir, to start an independent life in Reykjavik.
The story is following Hekla's journey to becoming a published author, in a conservative society where women had little to no voice, and writing like most other professions, was considered a male-only occupation.

the main reason I've requested this arc was that I'm an Iceland enthusiast (I'm not sure if its a thing), and I was hoping to get some sneak-peeks of the Icelandic lifestyle. many thanks to netgalley and Grove Atlantic for providing this electronic copy. I wasn't disappointed.

One thing that bothered me the most about this book: There was a big problem with the formatting of my electronic copy. And I've found myself jumping from one story to another without any clear ending to the chapters.

The cover on the other hand is really beautiful and fancy and was compatible with the story.
The storyline is a narration in the first-person from the perspective of Hekla, and written like snippets from a diary. I've struggled at first to get through the book. the descriptions and dialogues are emotionless and can seem lifeless in some parts. I'm not sure if it was intentional or it got something to do with the translation?
Nevertheless, The plot tackles some strong and dark topics like sexism and homophobia. And even if the characterization wasn't profound enough for my taste, most characters do grow on you.
Helka and Isey are exceptionally talented at writing, but their faith and beliefs were different. Hekla, who's named after the volcano, was born sure about her vocation and was ready to do everything to make her dream come true.
she is bold and fearless, and I really liked the way she handled all the obstacles that were thrown at her. I wasn't so sure about some of her final decisions (I don't want to spoil the story), and the way she excluded herself stoically. I guess it's part of the general scheme about her entire persona.

Jón John is Hekla's friend. He offered to share the room he's renting with her in Reykjavik. He is gay and is very talented with his sewing machine. He aspires to become a costume designer, and dreams about having a boyfriend with whom he can hold hands and walk freely in the city of Reykjavik. But that's not something you can do in 1960. he works as a sailor and his lovers are all closeted married men. his only solace is Hekla's company and his hope that one day he will move somewhere with more tolerant social rules.

Isey is Hekla's best friend and another character that I've found intriguing. She is newly married and mother of a baby. her existence is reduced to the basement and the little trip she does to get groceries. She is obviously miserable and torn between being a mother and the incessant urge in her soul to write fiction. She struggles to express what she's doing and describes her stories as journaling events that didn't happen. she is guided by her impulses to compose her stories. and I think she is becoming a novelist by accident.

I'm not familiar with the Icelandic language but I've noticed that the directions were mostly described using the cardinal directions instead of right-left. I wonder if it's the usual way Icelanders describe directions, this sounds really cool!

This book was so evocative and heart wrenching. It made me happy that I am alive now. There used to be so few choices for women and gays. As far as we still have to go I am happy we aren’t back there. This is a translated book and I love the lyrical writing.

Miss Iceland tells of the grey, small world of Iceland in the 1960s when people were beginning to recognize and appreciate their differences. Gay men, women whose writing opened horizons, mothers who wanted to be more than housewives, all were bursting the bounds of the small communities of Iceland.

I realized that I was considerably more irate than the book’s narrator, Hekla, about her treatment by the society of Reykjavik. Despite being a talented (and published) writer, the community decided that she should represent them on the beauty pageant circuit as Miss Iceland.

Time after time people were pushed into smallish boxes that didn’t allow them to be themselves, But, of course, ultimately, those people pushed back, or left the confining villages.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Even if it's quite slow I think it's a fascinating read and it kept me hooked.
It's the first book I read by this author and won't surely be the last.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

Unfortunately this one just didn't do it for me. I stopped at about 20% and maybe I gave up too fast but just about nothing happened. I was too bored to continue and didn't really care about anything that was happening. I thought this would be more of a writer trying to find adventure in Iceland in order to write so that was my fault for having that expectation. I wish I liked this one!

This book was not the one that was promised. Hekla aspires to be more than her 1960s self raised on a remote farm in Iceland. Hefting typewriter for writing her novel and a James Joyce novel, she heads for the city where she lives with her queer friend and attempts to eke out a living and create a writer life for herself. Sounds interesting, right? Unfortunately, the premise far exceeds the reality of this turgid, lumbering mass of words, more vacant and hopeless than the volcanic-influenced island she inhabits. By the middle of the story, I knew better than to expect an event, any event, to occur in the present time with Hekla using her newfound courage and skills to thrive. The supporting characters are fascinating, well-drawn--their stories are far more interesting than this driven, ultimately flat personality. Nothing happens unless it's in the past or to some other person telling her a story. The terrible realities of harassment, of cruel, and of hardship are brushed past in asides and dialogue rather than direct, honest, and genuine encounter. The shining moments are few and far between, but demonstrate the clear potential and talent of this writer -- here's hope that their next work is direct, focused, and has a story to tell. I am grateful to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read an advance copy of this book in exchange for my unbiased review.

Named after a volcano, Hekla escapes her rural hometown for Reykjavik, and hopes of becoming a successful writer. She has two friends there—young mother Isey and unwilling sailor Jon John. Hekla gets a job as a waitress in a hotel (where she’s harassed by a creepy man who wants her to enter his “Miss Iceland” contest) and a boyfriend (a would-be poet).

Eventually she and Jon John escape the restrictions of Iceland for Europe and hopes of more freedom. But Jon John can’t run away from his self-loathing for being different (i.e., gay) in early 1960s Europe.

Translated from Icelandic, the novel has a different cadence than American books. A refreshing change, but the lack of action might not appeal to the average reader accustomed to cliffhangers and relentless conflict. The slower pace takes some getting used to. #MissIceland #NetGalley

Hekla is a writer living in Iceland in the 1960s but because she is a woman, everyone around her keeps trying to tuck her back into more traditional roles of wife and mother. She is beautiful and pursued relentlessly by men who want her to compete to be Miss Iceland with somewhat questionable promises. The other key characters are her father, who is obsessed with volcanoes so much so that she is named after one and their conversations and gifts tend to revolve around whichever volcano is currently active; her close friend who is not straight and gets seasick, leaving him without a lot of options for work or relationships; her other close friend who has her own writing muse but is trapped in a basement apartment (no sun, no room) as a housewife and seems destined to be the mother of many children, close together.

Hekla has kept her writing life a secret and manages to do so even after moving in with her boyfriend who fancies himself a writer, a poet, and joins the other self-declared poets to have coffee and be seen writing in the cafes. In this way the author manages to capture the creative spirit of people living in Iceland but with a somewhat mocking way of revealing how people see themselves vs. where the true talent lies.

After reading Icelandic literature for a year, I'm still drawn back to it - it's a place I still haven't visited and want to, but I learn more about it in every book set there. This one has a lot about the culture of Reykjavik in the 1960s, where whale carving would take place down the block from a bookstore. The post-war years play a role, for instance did you know that an entire island was created by a volcano around the same time JFK was assassinated? There are a lot of place names and it's clearly translated by a British-English speaker because of some of the word choices, but all these things just work together to make it feel more Icelandic, of a certain time and place.

Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for my honest opinion. I definitely requested this book solely for the title, as Iceland is one of my favourite places to visit. This book was exactly what I was hoping for with some Icelandic culture, references and familiar features (the Volcano Helka has a character named after it!) Enjoyable characters and an interesting storyline made this one a hit!

I enjoyed the look at life in Iceland in the 1960s. The metaphor of volcanoes was really interesting as was the contrast between country and city life.

Because I had an advanced copy, the gaps in formatting lead to a very choppy reading experience. I often had trouble differentiating a part of the story and a "poetic line" that served as a section break.

*I received an advance copy of this book from NetGalley and the publisher and I am required to disclose that in my review in compliance with federal law.*

I'd like to thank the publishers via NetGalley for my free copy to review.

This book takes place in the early 1960's in Iceland. Hekla is a young woman in her early 20's who longs to be known as a great writer. She finds herself constantly being shut down in a male-dominated society who would rather see her become domestic (her boyfriend) and compete in a beauty pageant (most of the other men we meet in the novel). With only her best friends Isey and Jon John on her side, she perseveres and continues to write.

I was drawn to this book and finished it in just one day. I loved how Hekla was determined and to be her true self throughout the book. For a young woman in the male-dominated society of the 1960's, she went against the grain. I resonated with her character; determined and not one to give up. Although I didn't quite agree with the ending, I saw that it had to happen this way.

A great book!

Either Miss Iceland is completely brilliant or completely terrible; I honestly am having trouble deciding. Regardless, it was very different from books I normally read.

Hekla is an aspiring author in 1960s Iceland and we get to read a small snippet of her life. Hekla moves to a big city and lives with her queer best friend, then a poet boyfriend. She takes on a job as a waitress in a hotel and gets hit on constantly. One man aggressively pursues her to participate in a Miss Iceland beauty competition. Her life is very different from another friend’s who is married with children. The two lives provide a nice comparison of how women’s lives may have been like and their limited options in 1960s Iceland.

Not a lot happened in this book and I expected it to be very different from the book that it was. The cover and description are very misleading. This is not a cutesy book about a Miss Iceland pageant, an inspiring author, or female empowerment. I was interested in the characters and their struggles and it was a very quick read. It was choppy and I’m not sure if the issue is due to the translation or if this is typical for an Icelandic novel? Like I said, very undecided how I feel or want to rate this novel.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for granting me an ARC of this book in exchange for my unbiased and honest review.

I’m judging a 2020 fiction contest. It’d be generous to call what I’m doing upon my first cursory glance—reading. I also don’t take this task lightly. As a fellow writer and lover of words and books, I took this position—in hopes of being a good literary citizen. My heart aches for all the writers who have a debut at this time. What I can share now is the thing that held my attention and got this book from the perspective pile into the read further pile.

“Dead animals were found in troughs where gas puddles had formed: foxes, birds, and sheep. Then your father finally stopped talking about volcanoes and went back to farming. You, however, had changed. You had been on a journey. You spoke differently. You spoke in volcanic language and used words like sublime, magnificent and ginormous.

You had discovered the world above and looked up at the sky. You started to disappear and we found you out in the fields, where you lay observing the clouds; in the winter, we found you out on a mound of snow, contemplating the star.”

On a night when the streets of Los Angeles are engulfed in flames, borne from the grief and rage against murder after murder of Black men, it seems cathartic to read about a world that blends nature and magic, volcanic ash, and new words, the heat and fissure, curiosity and intelligence all warbling together. I do not know why this book found me today, but I’m glad it did.

Miss Iceland is a new Icelandic novel from Audur Ava Ólafsdóttir translated into English for a June 16, 2020 release date in the US. The story centers around Hekla, an aspiring female writer struggling to make her mark as an author in the traditionally male dominated field of poets in 1960’s Iceland, where they would much rather focus on her beauty to compete for Miss Iceland versus her intellect to write. What poems, short stories, and a novel she is able to get published is done so under male psuedonyms. She finds solace and escape with her best male friend, Jón John, who is stuck unable to be his true self as well, a gay man with a talent for sewing and fashion and a desire to be able to be open with his sexuality in an unaccepting world. They take care of one another while guarding each other’s dreams allowing them to be themselves with each other. Hekla also has a female best friend, Ísey, who despite a desire to write, travel, and follow a modern woman’s path like Hekla, succumbs to the traditional female roles after becoming a wife with multiple children.

After delving into the background of the author and Iceland, it did help further deepen appreciation of the book that sometimes fell short in its austere starkness and abrupt ending. Iceland has long been known for its love affair with books and literature. They publish more books per capita than anywhere else while ranking 3rd in literate countries, despite being “one of the smallest linguistic communities in the world.” They grow up hearing, learning, and proud of their Icelandic Sagas, The Poetic Edda, and their Nobel Prize winner Halldór Laxness. Their capital city, Reykjavik, where Audur grew up is a UNESCO City of Literature.
One of their oldest traditions is perhaps one they are most famous for is Jólabókaflód or the “Christmas Book Flood” that begins each year after the Icelandic publishers send every home a Bókatidindi that details all new published books. Because everyone gets at least 1 book as a present to open up on Christmas Eve to curl up and read, there is a frenzy of book buying at the tail-end of the year.
We see this history of ingrained respect and adoration for writers and books throughout Audur’s book Miss Iceland. Poets are name dropped at a considerable extravagance and characters are as well known for the town they are from as the Saga that hails from that same land.

The author celebrates her favorite part of being a creative writer: “The feeling of absolute freedom”, in her main character Hekla who would give up everything to strike out to a new country just to be free to write. Audur Ava Ólafsdóttir says she writes “to give a voice to those who have no voice - those who cannot shout out loud enough to attract the attention of the world...”. She has also written before about the existing fear of women and their education. Indeed we see that these same views and beliefs are evident in this book with her spotlight on gender inequality, particularly in Iceland’s past. However ironically, presently as of 2020, Iceland for the 11th year running, has topped the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index for gender equality. They were also the first country to elect a female President democratically and to have the only gay Prime Minister. After many hard fought battles for equal pay and fair employment, including famous mass strikes by women, parliamentary laws were enacted to guarantee as such. In fact, by January 2022, anyone employing more than 25 people will face daily fines if they aren’t independently certified that they are giving equal pay for equal work. This Miss Iceland book acts as a reminder lest we forget how far Iceland has come since the ages of Hekla, Jón John , and Ísey; and as a beacon of hope and example of where the US could aspire to and reach for as well.

Audur Ava Ólafsdóttir has said that after learning various foreign languages it opened up new worlds and their literature for her. She herself has even been published in over 25 languages! Now that her new book has been translated into our native tongue of English, we can take a glimpse into her Nordic world and have an opportunity to understand more deeply about not only Iceland’s heritage, but to find similarities in all of our struggles to be our true authentic real selves past and present.

#MissIceland #NetGalley

Miss Iceland gives us a look at Iceland in the 1960s. The struggles faced by women, by LGBTQ folks, by women who wanted to be writers, by people just trying to make it in the world. This book was so much more than I had anticipated. Highly recommend.

We often think of Scandinavian countries as being enlightened and ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to equality of the sexes. But here is a book to prove that even the apparently noblest of all countries needed to move forward and grow into something to be admired and emulated, that it doesn’t come naturally and that even Iceland was a Neanderthal of sorts in its behaviour and beliefs before it became an equal haven for women in late 1975 when the demonstration called Women's Day Off (Icelandic: Kvennafrídagurinn) stopped the country and changed it forever.

Set in the early ’60s, twenty-one-year-old Hekla is determined and absolutely driven to become a writer, with a small number of pieces of her work having been published, but only under a male pseudonym, never under her own moniker.

“No one is waiting for a novel by Hekla Gottskalkdottir.”

Leaving her remote farming family behind she moves to the biggest city Reykjavik to start life anew and try to forge a way ahead for her career. There are a group of men in the city that are lauded and feted for being writers, with nothing more expected of them than to sit around, drink coffee and talk about deep philosophical ideas all day long, but there is no such place for Hekla. She shares an apartment with Jón John, who is gay and once again we see that Iceland was not so forward-thinking or accepting of people who deviated from what was considered sexually normal. It was a place and time in history that thought gay men were automatically pedophiles. They are both outsiders wanting nothing more than acceptance for who and what they are, which seems an impossible dream. Hekla is hounded by men to partake in the Miss Iceland beauty pageant, with its underlying sexual abuse of the young women caught in the whirlwind of the pageant promises but is never encouraged to write. In this story, Hekla and Jón John battle the unfairness of their situations and try to survive in a time when standing out was not seen as a popular or wise thing to do.

“She also mentioned you. She said that some people were born out of themselves. Like you. She sent her regards to you and said … that there needs to be…. Chaos in the soul to be able to give birth to a dancing star…. Whatever that means…..”

This is a book that is written in such a style that is so different from what one typically finds in English speaking territories, being both choppy and disjointed. Caring for the main characters is kept to a minimum, with little given to make the reader connect with them apart from the obvious unfairness of their situations. It does show the bleakness of the situation for women and gays in the most effective manner, but some of the decisions Hekla makes are cold-hearted and just downright bizarre making it hard to appreciate her struggle to be a writer. Perhaps the greatest strength of this book is in its ability to transport modern-day readers back to a time that was so outrageously unfair and give us an insight into a world view that one can only hope never comes again.

A delightful, wry glimpse of the creative life of a young woman in Iceland in the 60s. The protagonist is a talented writer who diligently and quietly does the work of writing (not to mention waitressing) while the pretentious male poets in her circle sit around in cafes talking about writing without getting anything done. When her boyfriend discovers that she is a well-published writer herself, he can barely handle the comparison. A comic send-up of a certain brand of artistic ego that many women writers will find familiar.. a great companion piece to Lily King’s Writers and Lovers.

Iceland in the 1960s was a difficult time to be an aspiring female writer. With a harsh, but beautiful landscape built from fire and ice, it was also isolated and male dominated with few options for women apart from menial, underpaid work or marriage and motherhood. A land of many writers, but only men who were allowed to consider themselves as poets and writers with a sparsity of female authors. For Hekla, named for a volcano, writing is all she lives for but she keeps it a secret from all but her two best friends and publishes her work under a male pseudonym. Earning her living as a hotel waitress, she is told sexual harassment is an accepted part of the job and is constantly propositioned by a man who tells her she should enter the Miss Iceland beauty contest. Her boyfriend, an aspiring but unpublished poet, sees her as a trophy girlfriend to show off to his friends and fails to notice the fires burning within Hekla's soul.

Hekla's two best friends also yearn for more in their lives. Isey, married with a child and another on the way acquires art as a way to see beyond her confined life, whereas Jon John, gay and living in constant fear in a homophobic world, wants only to be a costume designer for the theatre. Instead he is forced to take work on fishing vessels and factory ships where he is openly derided by the other crew.

Beautifully written with gorgeous but sparse prose, this somewhat dark and quirky novel is about sexism, deceit, love and friendship but ultimately about the bond between two people who fail to conform to fit into society's strictures. I was a little disappointed by Hekla's decision at the end of the book which felt like a backward step for her and would be interested to hear what other readers think about it. I also felt that the cover for this version of the book does not fit the literary style of the book as well as the other covers I have seen.