Review: "The Last Whaler" by Cynthia Reeves

The Last Whaler by Cynthia Reeves
Published September 2024 via Regal House Publishing
★★★★

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.