This is a bit of a rarity. Today’s Travel Library is a work of fiction, and it’s not even children’s fiction (see What Katy Did Next!) No, this is firmly in the realm of adult fiction and set firmly in the modern day. Snug in Iceland by Victoria Walker, as the title suggests, is a nice cosy wintery tale about Iceland. Actually, this is really out of my comfort zone. I don’t read a lot of… well, is this romance or is this chicklit? Or is it both? Either way, it’s not my sort of thing. I’m going to therefore try not to overly criticise the parts of it that I’m not used to and stick to what I feel about the Iceland part of it.
That said, I’m going to start by criticising the romance. Rachel is offered a promotion whereby she oversees the opening of all the new stores in her chain in Europe. Snug is the store, a sort of artisan craft market full of handmade cushions and home decor. Quite how you scale that to 35-odd stores around the UK and branches in Oslo, Stockholm and now Reykjavik, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. It’s a device. Anyway, Rachel’s first job is to oversee the opening of the new Reykjavik store which means going to Iceland for three weeks.
Her boyfriend is unenthusiastic. Frankly, I’d have dumped this idiot long ago. He’s a City boy who works late (I’m still only in about chapter three at this point in the review but I can already see he’s surely having an affair) and Rachel comes home to an empty house, waits for him to get in and that’s pretty much it. He shows no interest in her work or her life, he’s always working when her parents come to visit, he’s got his career sorted and is expecting marriage and babies to plop into place next but Rachel can already see that he’ll be out until the babies are in bed, leaving her with all the work and him with a tick on his list but no actual involvement with his family actually happening in his life. She wants to go to Iceland but she also wants advancement in her own career and although she says she wants to feel like she’s achieved something at work before settling down, re marriage & kids, I don’t think she’s yet realised that she doesn’t want the empty life that’s going to come with a husband who can’t – or won’t – ever get home from work before bedtime. Do not marry him, Rachel. I mean, I know enough about romance/chicklit to know that she’s going to meet someone in Iceland and she and Adam are going to split up but at this stage in my reading, she hasn’t even gone to Iceland yet.
Ok, I’m now about halfway through. Rachel is at last suspecting Adam of being up to something too but it’s ok, because she’s met tour guide Jonas and is carrying on in a way that would get Adam into major trouble.
I have some issues with the Iceland of this book. It’s mid-February and still dark until 11am. I’ve been to Iceland in February. It’s not dark at 11am (and Time & Date’s sun calendar agrees with me!). Rachel takes a transfer from the airport to the Blue Lagoon – a transfer in a minibus with both guide and driver and the guide, having met her at arrivals, personally delivers drinks to the warm water. No. Folks, if you get a transfer to Reykjavik via the Blue Lagoon, you have to go outside and find the bus yourself and if there’s a drink included in the package, it’ll be on your Blue Lagoon wristband. You’ll go to the bar and get it yourself.
But I’m liking other details. Rachel gets her coffee from Te Og Kaffi. She spots what can only be Eymundsson on Laugavegur, she buys wool from the Handknitting shop on Skólavörðustígur, she eats at Noodle Station (under the name Noodle Bar) at Hlemmur, she takes the 14 bus to Laugardalslaug, she goes glacier hiking on Sólheimajökull with Jonas, Iceland’s most unprofessional tour guide and Northern Lights excursions actually get cancelled because of bad weather. So far, not so bad. Someone went on holiday and wrote down everything she did or saw!
Let’s talk about Jonas! Jonas is owner of a tour company which appears to run tours with two to four participants which… look, some companies are small. You’ll probably go out in a jeep. If there’s a minibus – if there’s a call centre where the staff refer to “one of our guides” who’ll run the trip – there should be capacity to fill that minibus occasionally. But putting aside that the company apparently has far more infrastructure than demand… oh, Jonas! Jonas flirts with customers. Jonas kisses them when delivering them to their hotels. Jonas holds their hands while taking them on a private visit to the local pool. Jonas kisses them properly when he invites them out to a bar. And Jonas thinks it’s fine to spend the night on the sofa of a summerhouse when the mountain road between Reykjavik and Þingvellir is closed because of a snowstorm, rather than taking the long road back to the city. I mean, why the Northern Lights tour wasn’t cancelled anyway is beyond me. Even two or three hours in advance, when Rachel is dropped off at a remote rural restaurant to have dinner between her Golden Circle tour and her Northern Lights tour, a snowstorm bad enough to close the road should have been seen coming and the dinner and the later tour should both have been cancelled halfway through the day. Let me clarify that both tours are run by the same company and the owner is keeping a special eye on this particular customer. The only way that snowstorm wasn’t spotted and the tour cancelled is that Jonas has manipulated the entire situation to entrap Rachel in a summerhouse with him overnight. Where it’s far too cold for anyone to sleep in the bedroom. No. There’s only one bed and it’s the sofa in front of the fire.
I know this is supposed to be romantic but this is not just unprofessional, this is going so far over the line of what’s acceptable that I just can’t take it.
And onto the second half!
Yes, Rachel finally breaks up with Adam – partly because she’s realised how little interest he really has in her and her life but partly because Adam admits to kissing other women while drunk. No mention made that Rachel’s also been cheating. That’s how it has to work. The villain has to be the soon-to-be-ex because the heroine has to break up with him and we need to keep rooting for her.
I’m really really disliking Jonas more by the page. The moment he and Rachel get together, he has to rush off for a three day tour. Rachel, wake up! This man has a woman on every tour bus! And then he dumps her as soon as he gets back? Yep. He’s been having fun but now you’re about to go home, he’s found his next target.
Ok, fine. I’m disappointed but not surprised Rachel and Jonas end up together. This is romance. It was inevitable from the moment he stepped onto the page. It’s not how the last third of the book would have gone if I’d been writing it – but then, the first two-thirds wouldn’t have gone like that either if I’d been writing it. Oh, and we saw Adam coming – how far in advance? Three chapters! Rachel, you’re an idiot. You were correct to dump him, I’ll give you that but to keep believing in him as long as you did? Idiot!
I like that the Secret Lagoon makes an appearance. It’s not that secret – even in-universe, it’s visited by tour groups – but I get the impression the author hadn’t actually been there herself. Everything else has been Andy Weir levels of detail (“I know everything so it’s all going in the book”) but the details of the Secret Lagoon are off. I agree, though. Amazing place to see the Northern Lights. To end on a display of celestial fireworks is cheesy but I’m guilty there myself – my own Arctic book (which wasn’t a romance, or even fiction) ended with a similar spectacle.
I liked this more than I expected. It’s clearly written by someone who’s been to all these places and I do like the idea of the juxtaposition of the snow and the sub-Arctic winter with the cosy homewares shop (by the way, fitting it out with IKEA furniture? Wouldn’t that be absolute burn-at-the-stake heresy to a company that’s all about handmade and unique?). I like the way Rachel’s story with Adam went and I’d be able to like Jonas a whole lot more if he wasn’t Rachel’s constant tour guide. I wasn’t going to read the sequel but I think I will now – the two romantic leads don’t meet while one of them is at work in the second book.
Oh, and by the way, if you wanted to find any of the locations in the book, I’ve made a map of as many as I can find.