"My little brother, Finley, drowned the first time wrestling the Napoleon pianoforte under the galactic starlight of an Arctic sunset; the way he later told the story, the piano had it coming." 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, beginning with siblings Milda, Finley, and Temperance; their parents, Viola and Fry; their ancestor Moose Bloomer, who began his immigration to the Arctic Territory as part of a large train of settlers but was, at 12, one of a few survivors to make it onto the permafrost; and the shrinking but hardy next generation. In a fantastical twist, each settler family brought a wildly impractical piece of equipment. "Issuing each family a map and an orange flag, the deed to their land hing[ed] upon their ability to 'civilize.' They were required to bring salt pork, botanical texts, and pianos--music, music being what would elevate the territory from raw, unbroken land into a homeland worth having." Moose's train lost and abandoned pianos across the region before settling and striving; pianofortes, surprisingly preserved by freezing waters, washed about the floors of the ocean and the Kamikaze River. Later homesteaders work as piano hunters. Antiques pulled up from the deep command impressive prices. 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 and their ivory keys can be found in the bellies of trout, glaciers melt, sea levels rise, and scant resources dwindle. Families battle the elements for survival, and they love one another in traditional and nontraditional ways. Viola, Fry, and their children live in a house on stilts, farming octopus and collecting sea beans, with a sea lion as a pet. They yearn only for "what other families had long ago achieved in terms of the conveniences of modern life: sanitation and heating ducts, coffee, dental work, telescopes, beehives." 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
Shelf Talker: In the Arctic, homesteaders dive for antique pianos and struggle to survive in this compulsively readable first novel of adventure and familial love.