She doesn’t suggest that more thought is given when cutting down trees, even though she identifies the clear-cutting they have started doing to expand the farm as the root of our society’s destructive disconnect from nature. Not only that, but for all her criticism of the world, when she does fall back in time, she makes no attempt to make the nightmarish future the whole world is headed down any different. Why doesn’t she just join them if she wants a deeper connection to the earth? There are apparently plenty of people who, for example, like to go full Reenactment and go live out in the wilderness. And it doesn’t even make sense because she talks about the various people around her in the 22nd century and at least some of them seem to be enjoying themselves tremendously. And also she has a fuck buddy that she doesn’t like. Maybe if we got a bit of context as to who she was, this kind of defeatist attitude would at least make sense, but we never learn anything at all about her life outside of the fact that she works as a researcher for a VR company making ancient Icelandic language accurate (I think? the specifics of her job are glossed over, but it’s something that requires language expertise). She absolutely hates the 22nd century, but there is no indication that she’s ever actually made an attempt to get the sort of “real” connection she craves and believes is impossible to forge.

I just don’t have time for Do Nothing women and our lead is one of the most passive characters I’ve encountered in ages. My problem with this novel has to do mostly with the characters. So if learning about how an ancient Icelandic farm prepared for winter (for months), or how its people occupied their time when it’s too cold to go anywhere or do anything, this book is going to be magical for you.

Of course, I can’t say I know enough about the subject to be a judge of its accuracy, but I did look into the research the author did for the book and it seemed almost overwhelmingly comprehensive. You could have pulled out the characters and plot and probably still have half the book left that’s just the domestic history of the Icelandic people. I think if you’re a normal person, this is exactly the right word to describe this book. On Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, the review for this book uses the word “soothing”. They lust after each other for a few hundred pages between Dissatisfied Future Woman spending weeks making fabric and learning all the small things that get lost in history about a culture.

Falls in love with a chieftain who has sworn to never touch anyone because of the curse he was born with (a big birthmark that is deemed a foul omen). Accidentally falls back in time to the Viking Age because of some weird quirk of 22nd century VR tech.

Plot: Dissatisfied Future Woman craves intimacy. This book is follows a pretty well trod premise at this point, though it does it well.

Beautiful wreck by larissa brown