They still haven’t definitively found Crozier, either.

115. The Snow Collectors – Tina May Hall

I’ve been interested in the Franklin Expedition for a long time. There’s something about being that stuck and found in bits and pieces (they even confirmed one body as Erebus’ engineer in 2021) that is very terrifying, hence The Terror for instance, and to me it wasn’t really a secret that Lady Jane Franklin was involved with expeditions and went on one to find out what happened to her husband Sir John Franklin. It’s not like she could wait until they found Erebus in 2014 or the Terror in 2016, even though Sir John Franklin died before everyone was attacked by the folkloric monster bear… Anyway, that seems to be the “secret” that the weird family with all the birds is trying to hide in their swampy basement of deep freezers and secret rooms in The Snow Collectors and it takes a long time and bad research practices to get there. And I believe we all know what I mean by bad research practices, see my little Twiglet and Duncan below. This book is one of the main reasons I did those two paintings as I was taken out of the story and it never got better from there for me. I think the narrator was also supposed to be considered unreliable and that was clear from the putting away her own library materials after misidentifying them. NO.

Henna’s haunted by the loss of her family, including her twin which would be very harsh to say the least, she’s living by herself in a small town that’s remote, she finds a frozen woman with a letter fragment (related to Lady Jane), and I guess she’s not keen on the local police dude who keeps talking to her (maybe because it’s clear she’s not super sharp in terms of her own safety). The mystery of the frozen woman was both a catalyst and a reason for Henna to just wander around even more often- it didn’t really push the narrative that much even though it seems like it would. It’s possible I missed something, but the lack of research material accuracy super bothered me, so, it wouldn’t be surprising if I didn’t in all that unreliable weird captive energy that came on halfway through the story and went to the basement wearing an antique dress.

 

Lady Hen Wen and Capt. Salem Crozier just went on couch expeditions – no Northwest Passage, but also no cannibalism, no TB, and no shoddily done fictional investigations later on.

 

Fiche cannot be wound, that’s film. And no library lets patrons put actual or magical realism fiche away themselves; no one’s ever going to find it again and I know this wasn’t clever enough to make that connection on purpose.