Book Summary: A haunting, compelling historical novel, The Sea Road is a daring retelling of the 11th-century Viking exploration of the North Atlantic from the viewpoint of one extraordinary woman. Gudrid lives at the remote edge of the known world, in a starkly beautiful landscape where the sea is the only connection to the shores beyond. It is a world where the old Norse gods are still invoked even as Christianity gains favor, where the spirits of the dead roam the vast northern ice-fields, tormenting the living, and Viking explorers plunder foreign shores. Taking the accidental discovery of North America as its focal point, Gudrid's narrative describes a multilayered voyage into the unknown, all recounted with astonishing immediacy and rich atmospheric detail.
My Rating/Review: 3-1/2 out of 5 stars. I wanted to like this book more than I did. The basic story and premise of the book were great, but I felt it lacked....something... Closure? I had originally tossed this book into the To-Read list since I'm very interested in Viking culture and I thought a book written from a woman's viewpoint would have some of that. It does, but only sort of peripherally. The story is told in flashbacks of the main character, Gudrin's, life to a young monk in Rome. The book vaguely hints towards some other history - like... why does anyone in Rome and the clergy care anything about this woman's story - and there are 2 pages at the end of the book that sort of sum up what was happening with the Papacy and Rome in the 11th century but it really doesn't tie together and I'm even a history major and I had to stop and go look up details (and yes, a history major with lots of reading done fairly close to this time period). That aside, I found the fact that certain sections of the book are Gudrin telling her tale and included asides she's making to the young man/monk who is the scribe of her story, and all of his dialogue is missing. That was an odd choice, I thought, to advance the story. Ultimately, it covers the explorations of Eric the Red into the North American continent and other Viking voyages to what they refer to as Vinland. Netflix actually has a great documentary about the long houses and other evidence of Viking life found on the coast of Newfoundland, and I liked the fact that the author obviously had done her research on those archealogical findings but I felt like some of the book was really contrived and that there could have been a more seamless blending of the narrative with all those historical details. Liked it, but didn't love it - appreciated the details but felt the story-telling lacked a bit.
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