WHAT MAKES A MYTH?

And how do those myths in turn shape us, sustain us, and sometimes prove to be our undoing?

These are the questions at the heart of DREAMING OF FREYDIS, a novel about two very different cousins from a gifted Danish family with a knack for re-invention and some hard memories of the Nazi Occupation.

Holly S. is a minor legend among the post-grads of late ‘90s Harvard Square.  Soulful and cerebral, but without credentials in academia or the arts, her attempts at starting a creative career and being a flamboyant “Dane of her own making” have left her dismissed as an eccentric ex-pat. Holly falls back on her ongoing research on Leif Eiríksson’s heroically villainous sister Freydis––a lifelong fascination passed down from her uncle Karl, a renowned in-vitro pioneer and amateur archeologist who once practiced in Greenland.

Shadowing Holly is the recent success of her younger, Americanized cousin, Winnie.  Tough and cocky, Karl’s daughter is in every way Holly's opposite, having evolved from a prep-school terror to a promising mountaineering and extreme sports star. But when a climbing expedition in Antarctica ends in disaster, forcing Winnie to make a ruthless decision, everything changes. Confronted with her notoriety, Winnie takes a recuperative corporate job in Greenland developing an alpine resort. Upon returning to her father’s old territory, Winnie turns inward, becoming obsessed with evidence that suggests an unnerving link between herself and Freydis. 

It falls to Holly to sort out the truth and bring her cousin home, however she soon finds that Winnie’s feverish claims shroud wartime family secrets far darker than either of them could ever imagine.