I'm torn on this book and Canadiana in general. I usually find it too depressing, a hallmark of Canadian fiction, nothing good ever seems to happen to any of the characters. Or if it does, it is fleeting and you read with clenched teeth just waiting for the disaster to happen. The best you can hope for is that someone will end up not-unhappy. At the conclusion of this book Gwen likes her job and doesn't hate her husband - it's a success of heroic Canadian proportions. :) I'm sure a tree will soon fall on her off-page. 
 I enjoyed reading about the far north and I always enjoy a story that takes place before the widespread use of the Internet - when people still got together in person instead of on social media, you drove or walked to someone's house instead of just texting them and adventures were planned out with maps and paper lists instead of GoogleEarth. Call me crotchety and old fashioned, life was more interesting then, less homogenized. 
 All in all a slow and plodding book, not the kind you rush through with bated breath, but the kind you pick up and put down 50 times before you finish. I won't rush to find anything else by Elizabeth Hay, but if I come across another book by her, I will read it.