I picked this up in a charity shop knowing nothing about the author but attracted by the innuit woman on the cover. Neither the innuit woman nor her photographer are credited - which about sums up the position of the women in the book. It did call to mind another woman writer of arctic adventures - Andrea Barrett - and there is some connection there in the viewpoint of a man's point of view but written by a woman. I found this less satisfying, a tale spun out to a novel's length, some disquiet as though she takes advantage of her characters, and the characters in the book not coming to life for me. But some really good writing in there to make the reading worth while. ( )

I picked this up in a charity shop knowing nothing about the author but attracted by the innuit woman on the cover. Neither the innuit woman nor her photographer are credited - which about sums up the position of the women in the book. It did call to mind another woman writer of arctic adventures - Andrea Barrett - and there is some connection there in the viewpoint of a man's point of view but written by a woman. I found this less satisfying, a tale spun out to a novel's length, some disquiet as though she takes advantage of her characters, and the characters in the book not coming to life for me. But some really good writing in there to make the reading worth while. ( )

First, I was really sucked in by this book. It is simply great storytelling, using the sparest kind of writing, incorporating things like loneliness, meteorology, mathematics, sexual obsession, Alaska during WWI, etc. I mean there is a lot of fascinating stuff in this slim novel. I admit that I would be the first to say, Who cares about weather, or the math used to predict it? Well, in THE SEAL WIFE, Kathryn Harrison writes about these esoteric elements so well that she makes you care.

Harrison has written a half dozen or more books by now, but THE SEAL WIFE is the first one I've read, although I certainly remember all the publishing industry buzz nearly twenty years ago about her notorious memoir, THE KISS, which detailed an incestuous affair an adult Harrison had with her father. So, knowing that much, perhaps I should not have been surprised by the sexual detail found in THE SEAL WIFE, about Bigelow, a young weatherman in Anchorage, Alaska, who becomes obsessed with a mysterious, self-possessed and silent Aleut woman during the years of WWI. Harrison paints a darkly luminous portrait of the loneliness of frontier life in the land of the midnight sun, a rough, bleak region populated mostly by men.

Again, one wouldn't think reading about the mathematical calculations needed for weather forecasts or constructing a giant kite to send weather instruments miles into the sky would be all that interesting. Well, trust me, it is.

Far in the back of my mind, I keep recalling a novel I read years ago about an Irish fisherman who marries a "seal wife" - a riff on the Selkie legends - but I cannot for the life of me remember the title or author of that book. In any case, there are very subtle elements of that old Celtic myth artfully woven into the story of young Bigelow and his Aleut lover.

But I don't want to spoil any of this story for other readers. It is, however, one of the most mesmerizing books I've read in a long time. I LOVED it! Very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER ( )

The Seal Wife is one of the most beautiful books I've ever read. I just finished it and I wish there was more to read! It's a rather minimalist book with short chapters and sparse dialogue. It uses vignettes to pull the story along. As the book is mostly from inside Bigelow's mind, a self defined loner who is in Anchorage to forecast and study the weather, the book's minimalism beautifully captures the experience of being alone among others, an observer given time to absorb the surroundings and think about things. ( )

This very unusual novel is the story of Bigelow, a young mid-western man who is sent to Anchorage, Alaska in 1915 to establish a weather station. He arrives without the barest necessities or knowledge of what is expected of him, thinking that there is an established station, and when he realizes the situation he has to find the land to put the station on, arrange and pay for the construction at horribly inflated prices and in a place where most of the supplies he requires don't exist (i.e, nails), and then he must acquire laborers to build it and figure out how to make them work once that arrive on the jobsite. Meanwhile, the weather station is almost totally cutoff from the town of Anchorage, so that he meets no one and makes no friends. His nearest neighbor is an Aleut woman with whom he is fascinated and eventually creates an unusual relationship, albeit a silent one. After that relationship disintegrates Bigelow, who is socially inept, has to find other ways to survive in the desolate and unforgiving north.

Two of the major themes of this book are sound and silence. Music is both a succor and means by which the weather station gets built. The women in the book are either silent, and their means of and reasons for silence must be discovered by Bigelow, or they are so chatty that he pays them to keep quiet.

Along the way Bigelow discovers that his survival in Alaska is more than food and foul weather gear and is very different than in any other place he has lived.

The writing was excellent, at times lyrical, at times very spare. Bigelow was not at first a very likeable character, but he was sympathetic and his persistence and doggedness grew on me. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys books which are a bit off the beaten path. ( )