Beautiful prose but desparately sad. I didn't feel strong enough to read the whole story having scoped the end.

I had no idea of Svalbard until a childhood friend lived there from some time and discovered this fascinating world from the pictures she posted. Now reading this powerful story about grief, survival and resilience with the author’s beautiful writing took me righ there. What a moving read.

Thank you Suzy Approved Book Tours for this tour invite.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗟𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝗹𝗲𝗿 by Cynthia Reeves released September 3, 2024.

It's 1937, and Astrid has made the decision to accompany her husband, Tor, to Svalbard for the whaling season. It's the sort of decision one makes in haste and repents at leisure: one made out of grief; one leading to a reality that neither Astrid nor Tor, who has spent many a season in Svalbard before, is prepared for.

"I didn't understand then the nature of grief, that it doesn't fade away but loops endlessly." (loc. 3763*)

I picked this up because I recently read Christiane Ritter's "A Woman in the Polar Night"—a memoir about a year spend on Svalbard in the early 1930s—and I was enthralled; I wanted to see what a contemporary novelist would do with a similar setting. And Reeves is clearly inspired by Ritter, who is a minor off-page character in "The Last Whaler", though Astrid's experience and her takeaways are rather different than Ritter's.

We get two points of view here: Tor, looking back later on the time he and Astrid spent in that harsh landscape—first with other whalers and then starkly alone—and Astrid, telling her story through letters to her son. I didn't love the letters: they didn't feel realistic as letters someone would write to a young child, even under the circumstances in the novel, and I would have preferred either a journal or just Astrid's non-epistolary point of view.

What sold it for me, though, is how much research and context there is here. Occasionally I think Tor leans a bit contemporary in his views than is realistic, but what intrigues me is the way in which, although cut off from the outside world, they are always aware on some level that that outside world continues: the world encroaches, whether they want it to or not. Maybe Astrid would have fared better had she stayed back in the outside world, or maybe the barren landscape isolation simply hastened what was to come. In any case, it's a fascinating story.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Wow did I get lucky with this one! The cover and title piqued my interest, and I’m so grateful to NetGalley for advancing me a copy in exchange for an honest review. So here goes.
I knew from the first few pages of this book that this was a special one. One in which I would cherish every word and every page would not skim or skip. This book is about a father and husband, who has made a living in the whaling industry in the Arctic region of Svalbard, and has come back to the area from his home in Norway to confront the ghosts of his past. The theme of this book is grief and ultimately renewal, and I would have to say if you cannot handle heavy grief at this moment, I would steer clear of this one. However, as someone who has experienced grief and loss a little more distantly, I found it cathartic. I cried, I grinned, I closed my eyes and imagined the scenes before me. The absolute beauty of this book is not only the excellent writing, but in the books ability to transport you to this frozen landscape of which I previously did not know much about. The amount of research the author must’ve put into this book is incredible. From whaling, to artic flora, to the history of WW2 in the Arctic, and to what life is like living in the farthest reaches of our Earth, the author fascinated and captivated me.
I cannot say enough good things about this book, and I feel so privileged that it crossed my path. As an avid reader, especially of historical fiction, I am extremely picky and this was unlike any book I’ve ever read. It feels like a beautiful, haunting dream that I don’t want to leave. The story was compelling throughout and really did keep me going until the very last page. I cannot wait to see what this author does next.
Five giant stars from me. 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

This short but poignant novel explores the troubled marriage of a young couple isolated in a cabin throughout the Arctic winter. The narrative begins in mid-June 1947 in Kvitfiskneset, Norway, but the story focuses on the factors leading up to a tragic decision that the husband, Tor Handeland, is still struggling to understand ten years later.

Although Tor has a family farm in a gentler region south of Kvitfiskneset, in 1937 he makes his living by catching and killing beluga whales. However accurate for the period in which the novel is set, his complete indifference to the possible intelligence of his prey or even the effects of whaling on the environment makes him a difficult character for a modern reader to love. (He justifies the killing by asserting that industrial methods of mass slaughter give the whales a more humane death than the harpooning used by indigenous peoples, for example.) As a result, his inability to grasp the depths of his wife Astrid’s grief at the tragic loss of their son or her response to months without either sunlight or company—revealed in the novel through a series of letters she writes to the child after his death—is not surprising. But to Tor’s credit, he does genuinely want to help in the moment and to understand what went wrong, and that eventually redeems him in the reader’s eyes.

Told in often-compelling prose, this novel at its heart addresses questions not so much of mental illness per se as of the immense power of tragedy to shape our thoughts and, in doing so, determine the course of our lives. In an age and a place that often constrained or denied emotional expression, the consequences of grief could, quite literally, be deadly—and “The Last Whaler” invites us to think about that.

I plan to interview this author on my blog (link below) around the time of the book’s release.

Tor and his wife Astrid try to set things right while grieving the death of their youngest son. Astrid accompanies Tor to the Arctic of Norway to be with him as he and his crew hunt and harvest beluga whales. Hoping a different context will spur them on to find freedom from their grief, the opposite occurs and Tor is required to navigate much more than he anticipated in order to save their marriage when he and Astrid are stranded throughout the dark days of the arctic winter.

"The Last Whaler" is a reflection on grief and mental illness, a dive into human psychology and the gradual decline into madness. Told from the perspectives of both Astrid and Tor, the reader is given glimpses of the same experiences through two different pairs of eyes. It is a beautifully written and sad story, one that will stay with the reader for a long time once it is finished.