Reviews tagging 'Death'

Cold Earth by Sarah Moss

5 reviews

victoria_catherine_shaw's review against another edition

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dark mysterious reflective tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

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tamara_joy's review against another edition

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challenging dark tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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e_l_bee's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious reflective tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

not my favorite sarah moss book, but still a sarah moss book, which is to say: good and tense and thought provoking! i absolutely love the way sarah moss can find meaning and joy while exploring the absolute fucking worst of people. she’s also such a nerd!!!! i love it!!!!

seasonal readers beware! do not be fooled as i was. this is a SUMMER book not a winter book. still good though. 
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definebookish's review against another edition

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dark reflective tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

A pandemic novel, sort of. Not this pandemic – Cold Earth is Sarah Moss’s debut novel, published in 2009 – but a chillingly similar one, unfolding offscreen while, in shot, a group of student archaeologists excavate a lost Viking settlement.

In remote costal Greenland, six young people spend a summer digging, bickering, eating dehydrated noodles and trying to understand what killed off the area’s previous inhabitants, centuries ago. They have little contact with the outside world; connecting to the internet is expensive, and they don’t have smartphones. Oxford student Nina – not actually an archeologist, but a tagalong friend of the dig’s lead – is spooked from the outset, missing her fiancé and hearing noises from outside the tents at night.

The blurb didn’t really prepare me for how eerie this story is. It’s literary fiction meets cli-fi, seasoned with a sprinkling of speculative horror. It reminded me of both Michelle Paver’s Dark Matter and the 1990s movie The Hole, and yet also very much of the more recent Moss novels I’ve read – Ghost Wall and Summerwater. The writing isn’t as taut as either of those, but it is as tense and claustrophobic.

Like Ghost Wall, this is a tale of the past reverberating in the present. Sarah Moss’s characters always seem to inhabit the world in a way that emphasises how precarious their – and our – existence is. How small and fragile we are. How much at the mercy of the elements, and each other. Reading this one a decade after publication, that’s even more apparent. I’m very much here for the mounting sense of dread, and the food for thought Moss always leaves me with. A haunting, deeply unsettling read.
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tirrato's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

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