"My little brother, Finley, drowned the first time wrestling the Napoleon pianoforte under the galactic starlight of an Arctic sunset." The Pillagers' Guide to Arctic Pianos is a wildly imaginative story centered on the adventures and trials of a homesteader family in the Arctic. Kendra Langford Shaw's first novel follows these determined renegades as they establish and struggle to keep lives, livelihoods, homes, and community in a tremendously harsh environment.
Chapters alternate between characters and perspectives: siblings Milda, Finley, and Temperance; their parents; their ancestor Moose Bloomer, who began his immigration to the Arctic Territory as part of a large train of settlers; and the shrinking but hardy next generation. In a fantastical twist, each settler family brought a wildly impractical piece of equipment. "They were required to bring salt pork, botanical texts, and pianos... music being what would elevate the territory from raw, unbroken land into a homeland worth having." Moose's train abandoned pianos across the region before settling and striving; pianofortes, preserved by freezing waters, washed about the floors of the ocean and the Kamikaze River. Later homesteaders work as piano hunters. Readers meet Finley when he is a young boy obsessed with recovering his family's Napoleon, and this obsession will guide several lives.
In this strange Arctic world in which sunken pianos are desirable prey, glaciers melt, sea levels rise, and scant resources dwindle. Shaw's imagination is broad, her characters delightful, and their fates often painful but also transcendent. The Pillagers' Guide to Arctic Pianos is a lovely profile of a singular, stark place and a small, tight cast of indelibly colorful characters: a heart-wrenching, unforgettable debut. --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia