Local “Bright Light” Dazzles with The Tricking of Freya

by Celia DuBose, 2009-10-08

This was her first novel, and knowing how little publicity she would get from her publisher and how undone I had been by the sheer beauty of the book’s jacket and website, I promised to write this review. My new friend Christina Sunley was proving to be a sweet and good person (spending her days as a full-time nonprofit fundraiser). What were the chances that she could also be as good a novelist as I would need her to be to avoid pretzel syndrome, in which I become a contortionist in order to transform my true opinion into something approaching praise? Dread made the blank space between “Chapter 1” and its first line seem vast and mocking. I was breathing heavily. Everything depended on these first words!

Oh, thank God. The six words tossed me into a crisp landscape where something important was broken. Hoping for a healing, I finished the first chapter just in time to make it over to Diesel Books in Oakland for Christina’s first reading. I looked her in the eyes and smiled without any pretzel fears.

At another reading, one audience member wanted to know who might play Freya in the movie version. Wait a minute? Was this book really going to be that good? The reviews were beginning to come in, and I knew I had a travelogue ahead of me. I was still just a few chapters in, and the girl from the first paragraph was already so broken down that by the time she appeared as a young woman she was living in New York having purposefully isolated herself from family in Canada and Iceland and virtually buried herself alive in a darkroom by day and a basement apartment by night. I wasn’t sure there was going to be any journey here beyond this poor child’s decent into hell.

And I knew that Christina had lived in Iceland while doing volumes of research for this book. I was still afraid that the novel might be overwhelmed by fascinating and impressive, but ultimately excessive and just plain wrong-for-a-novel forays into Icelandic history, poetry, lore, language, and geography.

Nope. The Tricking of Freya quickly became the proverbial page-turner with all deep knowledge and literary chops serving the cause invisibly. Its dark beginnings became a kind of warp-drive propelling Freya into homes and hearths never remotely imagined to be her own. By the time we hit Iceland, I was absorbed in a tension-filled action movie with Darryl Hannah as the bipolar Birdie on a crazed high dragging a teenaged Scarlett Johansson (as a blonde, of course) through Iceland’s verdant hills, past glaciers and lava flows, through ice tunnels, and inside and out of the impossible beauty of that country’s most dangerous places, especially those where love lived.

Underneath all the furious searching for national treasures, for suspects, for something hidden long ago is the real travelogue. It is the story of a reluctant heroine’s journey toward her own healing achieved largely through her victory in extracting every good thing from her heartbreaking childhood under the tyranny of bipolar disorder.

I finished the book months ago when it first came out, and I’m still kicking around inside it, marveling at the way this truly brilliant novelist put words together to make magic. I am also rejoicing that I didn’t have to bend anything to write this review. I never liked pretzels. Not even chocolate-covered ones.

Happily, we all have a chance to see and hear the author, described as one of the “bright lights of new fiction,” reading from the Tricking of Freya on October 17th at LITQUAKE - LitCrawl from 7:15-8:15 at Modern Times, 888 Valencia in San Francisco.


Celia DuBose has worked as managing editor of an academic journal, as an organizer and writer for environmental and social justice groups (and a few corporate entities), and as a singer/songwriter/musician. She met Christina at a bar talking biodiesel over jazz and French food.