Storm Pegs by Jen Hatfield

A very good insight to changing your life and taking a very different path from what is seen as normal.
I loved the nature of it all and how she integrated into isle life.

This is such a beautiful book. It is about Jen Hadfields' life in Shetland over the course of about a year.

This book made me ache to see the places Jen so eloquently describes, from cold water swimming to hiking to cliffs, I felt I was there too.

This is a journey of discovery, about place, people, and self. It is understanding what people can do when they live "at the edge."

I had always thought the Shetland was a bit remote, but this challenged me to consider what remote really is.

Jen is a poet, which comes across in the magical use of her prose. I was laughing out loud in parts and weeping in others. I wished I had a paper version of the book to underline paragraphs about swearing, descriptions of the sea, and the beautiful Shetland words.

This made me want to visit even more, to take in the stunning beauty described and also, hopefully, catch a whisper or two of the Shetland language in use.

Storm Pegs by Jen Hadfield is an exceptionally beautifully written novel about what fell into place in her life to get her to move to Shetland. Her descriptions of the elements, weather changes and isolated living at times captured my curiosity of the reality of living amongst such complicated beauty.

I love this book. I fell into the rhythm of Jen’s writing style and I wish I could love to Shetland too!

Incredible at her craft, Jen Hadfield, writes about her life at Shetland, and proves that great writing is not about unexpected twists or twists for the sake of simply shocking the reader, nor is great memoirs about the author themselves. Putting the heart and soul of Shetland at its core, Hadfield’s writing transforms and transports the reader with the execution of details of every day life, adaptation, local slang, nature and community. I enjoyed every bit of it.

Poetic, intense and beautiful. This was a moving glimpse into a life well loved.

Jen is a master of emotive and vividly connected storytelling.

An account of Jen Hadfield's years spent living in the Shetland Isles, this attempts to understand the people and islands through both a physical experience of creating a home there, but also an emotional connection through the language and how the people express themselves and the land they live on. This is an exploration of geography and place and where home is and what that feels like. I love that Hadfield returns again and again to the idea that most people have that Shetland is remote and how, in her own experience, it is a vital, central part of her being and that living there makes her feel like she is in the middle of everything and building connections that radiate outwards all the time. Poetry and practicality learn to sit side by side in this fascinating memoir.

A luminous recentring of a place that gets bigger the closer you look

Hadfield's loving and dense book, equal parts autobiography and paean to her island home, is an answer to the question 'Where am I?' but Hadfield's radical refocusing of the Edge to the Centre is intertwined with the as urgent question of 'Who am I?'

Often described as remote, Shetland comes into wild detail under Hadfield's poet eyes, getting larger and deeper the more that she and we explore the islands. It reminded me of John Crowley's similarly dense novel Little, Big, where getting closer to the landscape reveals an even larger world beyond, full of mysteries and delights.

Alongside the cast of friends, neighbours and tourists, Shetland is another visceral character, a geologic mother, a sleeping giant, harried by the other major characters that colour the narrative, the sea and the weather. They are as they should be, neither inimical nor anthropomorphised, simply a part of the world that Hadfield soothes herself into, like a limpet on a rock.

I imagine the trickle of women's narratives of life in other places is one response to the boundaries that Covid-19 imposed on us, but I'm loving seeing the world through eyes that I cannot even imagine.

Four and a half stars, rounded up to five.