Johanna Sinisalo

David Hackston

A young Finnish go on the hiking trip of a lifetime. As they attempt increasingly challenging trails, their trek develops a sinister aspect as unsettling incidents occur.

Birdbrain

Janice Hopper

Holy carp, what to say about this book...

First off, it's my second book by a Finnish author in a fairly short time. The two authors, Sinisalo and Emmi Itäranta, couldn't be more different in style or subject. 

Birdbrain tells the story of two Finnish eco-tourists hiking in Tasmania and New Zealand. The timeline is a bit fragmented. There's some jumping back and forth in time and place. I actually sat down at one point and started a linear timeline, just to get the events to line up clearly in my head. 

Jyrki, the male of the party, is a hard-core hiker, seeking out places farthest off the beaten track for his travels. Heidi is more rooted in the modern world. She basically joins Jyrki's trip on a whim. Each one relates what happens from his/her own point of view. That's actually an interesting way to tell the story, because Heidi and Jyrki tend to see things VERY differently.

The hikers' narratives are interspersed with quotations from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and with little accounts told from another viewpoint. (view spoiler)[I apparently missed the fact that these accounts of someone doing bad things were being done by Heidi's brother. Who may or may not have been a kea. And there may or may not really have been a kea in the story at all. It was all rather confusing.  (hide spoiler)] These accounts from a third viewpoint are disturbing, and add to a building sense of dread through the book.

In the end, I can't say for sure whether I think the book was successful or not. The whole situation of the hikers got in my head a bit and worried me, so the storytelling was effective in that respect. I can't say I really LIKED the characters, but that doesn't seem to have been as much of a deal-breaker in this book as it sometimes is for me. I think it might be worthwhile to go back and read it again and see if I understood more things better now.

Birdbrain

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