Tide, Feather, Snow Book Review by ChristineMM

Tide, Feather, Snow Book Review by ChristineMM



Title: Tide, Feather, Snow: A Life in Alaska
Author: Miranda Weiss
Genre: memoir/nature
Publication: Collins, 2009
ISBN: 9780061710254
Full Retail Price: $24.99 (hardcover)

My Star Rating: 3 stars out of 5: It’s Okay

Summary Statement: Enjoyed the Nature Writing but Timeline Was Confusing at Times, Felt Detached and Emotionally Flat


I was thrilled at the idea of reading this book when I accepted a review copy from Amazon Vine shortly after its publication. I have read over a half dozen memoirs about people moving to Alaska to live off the land and have always enjoyed reading those stories. This theme described in the marketing materials is one that interests me a great deal. I am one who has romantic notions of this endeavor and my trip to Alaska via cruise ship has only fueled this fire. My grandparents also homesteaded in the woods of Maine near Mt. Kathadin, and the stories of their hard life, building their own two homes (one lost to fire) and living with ‘making do’ with a low income have been heard over and over. Lastly I was interested in the book because I am a nature observer who visits the Atlantic coast regularly and lives near Long Island Sound.

The book did not draw me in at the beginning or later on. I felt it had a flat tone or a kind of distant emotion, like the author was detached or viewing things from a distance. So I picked it up and put it down numerous times for over six months. This month I forced myself to read it from cover to cover in order to give the book a real chance to prove itself. Sadly the book didn’t ‘pick up’. I’m disappointed in the book for multiple reasons besides the ‘flat’ tone which I did feel was present throughout. I felt that the author was keeping some walls up, preventing the reader from knowing some of her emotions or thoughts.

Perhaps what was most problematic for me was the book starts off with her moving to Alaska with her boyfriend, a dream she had long before ever meeting him. However little in the book is about their relationship and her life. She reports on topics as if from a distance almost like a journalist writing a magazine article, rather than connecting them to her own personal opinions as is the usual tone of a memoir book. It felt like some of these chapters in the middle of the book would have been better suited to being published as single magazine articles, especially topics such as describing the Old Order Russian Orthodox residents who lived on a compound. If my point is unclear, let me try to explain it this way: sometimes it is like a memoir telling of her experience moving to Alaska and other times it reads like investigative journalism, long magazine articles, and it goes back and forth. The pacing of the book is off, it felt ‘uncomfortable’, detached or "off" (it's hard to explain).

The timeline felt jumbled in the book and left me feeling confused while reading it. I was confused about when the book was being written. I assumed it was progressing forward from the first months there but the writing often seemed to be a general observation of that seemed to be about multiple seasons’ experiences. For example a person who just moved to Alaska would have certain observations of birds and animals but the writing seemed to be referring to them with a more comfortable ease after having viewed them for multiple years, lacked much emotion or first impressions and included more information about them that must have come from research (rather than just being the author’s personal experience viewing them and her emotion).

The book wrapped up telling of how her romantic relationship with her boyfriend wound up but what was in the middle of the book seemed to be about multiple years’ time having lived in Alaska. The book left me curious to know more about the author so I read her website and saw that she left Alaska to obtain her master’s degree and wrote this book while in New York, and then she moved back to Alaska. I think that explains why the writing is the way it is: it seems not to have been written with fresh memory as the first year or two of Alaska was being experienced, it has a distant feel to it.

By the end I felt that the writer’s strength was describing her observations of nature and telling general stories about life in Alaska. This is good writing taken chapter by chapter or if published as magazine articles or magazine essays, but something felt off about the pacing and timeline of it when presented in a book format and marketed in the genre of memoir/nature that made me think as a BOOK it is mediocre.

The author’s respect and awe for nature was clearly evident as is her worry for what she perceives as negative effect’s of human’s inhabitance of Alaska (even the Native population’s actions that damage the ecosystem and use the natural resources). Her views about the environment are in line with the current concern of global warming and the idea that “people are trashing this Earth and nature is fragile” as well as being in the “anti-oil” camp. I’d thought that the toughness of nature might be clear to her but she kept referring to nature as fragile. So this book is not just happy nature lover’s thoughts, there are worries and concerns expressed as well. This book may be embraced by those new to the green living movement.

I rate this book 3 stars = It’s Okay for my issues with the pacing and writing style which felt detached and unemotional to me. I really wanted to love this book and think this is a fair rating for this book.



Disclosure: I received an uncorrected proof edition of this book with a retail value of $0 from the Amazon Vine program so I could publish a review on Amazon.com’s site. I was not paid to write this review nor did I have an obligation to share it on my blog. For my blog’s full disclosure statement see the link at the top of my blog’s sidebar.