On Northern Bull

I read this as a free advance copy from the publisher, in exchange for an honest review; the opinions are entirely my own.

Oh, sweet Jesus, I loved Michelle Swallow’s debut novel. I’ll admit I requested it partly for the cover, but also because the idea of a book set in the Northwest Territories — in peak winter — seemed delicious. I hadn’t read anything quite like it, and while the isolation and the small-town feel of being that far north might seem new, even exotic, to many readers, the story will ring familiar to anyone north of the Ohio River. It took me about a week to get through the first sixty pages — they’d pulled me in, but I was juggling other books and obligations — and then I read the entire rest of it in one sitting.

The premise: a few friends in their mid-thirties go out for a wild night, and by the end of it a moose head has gone missing. The next morning, in true Hangover fashion, no one knows what happened to it, and various attempts to recover it ensue, with a great many side shenanigans, the whole thing unfolding over slightly more than twenty-four hours. Some of it is stunningly ridiculous — nearly being shot at, actually getting shot, stealing a snowmobile for a race, getting evicted, forgetting your dress at home and going out topless in only a parka, blowing up a minivan with dynamite. At times I asked myself what I was even reading. Every character has just lived the worst day of their life, and yet they find joy and excitement in it, and it’s so much fun. It may not be Faulkner or Nabokov or Eliot, but the writing is crisp and the dialogue is witty (how many metaphors can one book find for sparks flying? — he “smothered her chimney fire,” he “thawed her water pipe”). There’s one moment in the last act, between Jacques and Maggie at a big event, that I couldn’t read without grinning; Swallow renders their chemistry beautifully, without clichés or tired tropes. It’s cheesy, of course it is, but it’s heartwarming and loving and goofy, and I want more of it.

In the end it’s a love letter to small-town life in Canada’s Northwest Territories, and to Yellowknife especially. It’s coming out at the perfect moment, this January, and I hope both Canadian and American readers pick it up and read straight through; it’s a novel that deserves to be read and shared, and I genuinely hope it finds a wide audience.