Her memories of that night are never the same. They are both little girls, Unnur and her friend Freyja, alone on a black-sand Icelandic beach, the waves clutching at them. In one memory, Freyja ignores her pleas and walks into the sea. In another, Unnur yanks Freyja’s head underwater until the bubbles stop. Which is true? She’s never known. She can’t remember.
All that is about to change.
In Margrét Ann Thors’ Freyja, it is now 27 years later. After that night, Unnur was sent to distant relatives in America. She grew up, met an Icelandic man and returned home, but the marriage didn’t last. Now, divorced, with a young daughter of her own named Lilja, Unnur receives a series of shocks.
- An envelope appears in her mailbox, unstamped, unaddressed. In it is a note calling her by a nickname only Freyja used, and the words Remember Me?
- Her boss lends her a novel he’s reading – “Hot off the press!” – called The Girl Who Spoke to the Sea, based on a true story. The story is Freyja’s disappearance. The author is anonymous.
- Unnur’s ex-husband arrives in town for a long-scheduled custody hearing. With him is a new girlfriend. She is a detective, come to open a new cold case project in Reykjavík centered around…missing girls and women. With her is her own daughter, named Freyja.
“You’re doing that thing,”Lilja tells Unnur. “That look you get, like you’re watching a scary movie no one else can see.”
The girl has no idea how scary.
In desperation, Unnur must battle to find the truth, digging deep into the past she has always tried to shut out, while, around her, her present disintegrates into chaos, Freyja had always been obsessed with Icelandic folklore – “magic, miracles, monsters” – but Unnur had never believed in any of it. Now she is beginning to wonder if the monsters are real, after all.
Freyja is a spellbinding novel, a deep portrayal of families, myths, and memory; of the lengths a mother must go to, to protect those she loves – a story at once otherworldly and very much rooted in flesh and blood. Reading it, you might start getting “that look” yourself.
“When I began writing the novel,” the author says, “I wanted to give life to some of the stories my dad had told me about his childhood years in Iceland, especially being sent as a young boy to work summers on the farm of a distant relative. He did not speak fondly of those years! I also wanted to explore the landscape that’s home to my family history – the South coast. This is, for me, where the line between natural and supernatural wobbles, the starkness of the sky, the extreme weather, the quiet, the moss-covered lava rocks, the mist.
“The book evolved immensely in the years that followed. While I had a clear vision for the strange, hazy childhood chapters in the countryside, I didn’t yet know the present-day storyline, not even who the protagonist would be. That only began to take shape after I became a mother.
“I think the inspiration for one of the book’s central mysteries, Freyja’s disappearance in the Dark Valley, can be traced to a tour of a glacier I took during college. We were in a super-jeep with enormous tires, and there was so much snow and wind that all we saw was white. I need to pee. The tour guide told me I could get out, but that I needed to keep one hand on the jeep the whole time; otherwise, I might lose sight of it, they might lose sight of me, and we wouldn’t hear each other over the wind. I could simply vanish.
“That idea – of vanishing in a blink – stuck with me. It became one of the book’s animating questions: what would a child’s disappearance mean for the people who love her? And especially, what would such a loss mean for a woman like Unnur, who harbors a secret that could jeopardize her place in her daughter’s life?”
To read more of Neil’s review and discussion with Margrét Ann Thors, go here.
