If the Owl Calls, by Sharon White

Get a clue

Hans, a recent widower and Sami police detective living in Oslo, is sent to investigate a sabotage attempt at the dam and discovers a body. Investigating the two potentially connected events, Hans has to confront the identity, ancestry, and culture he left behind. Kathryn, a young woman hoping to escape the stifling expectations of an American life finds herself working a farm stay near the Alta Dam and caught in the midst of conflicts she doesn’t fully understand.

Alongside themes of power, identity, and culture, the narrative experimentation in this novel—where events often seem entirely random, entirely too convenient, or entirely disconnected from the main narrative—contribute to a tension between questioning the human impulse to create understanding through narrative and questioning who exactly gets to control larger cultural narratives. Ultimately, this experimentation ends up feeling at odds with the police procedural narrative, which is the main thrust of the novel.

Hans’ dismissal of events that seem obviously connected are harder to accept knowing that he is a seasoned detective, and contribute to a stagnant reading experience. As a detective, Hans spends almost no time actively looking for clues, rather they fall in his lap from a supporting cast of characters who read like caricatures. The fact that there is procedure to be followed and that Hans is a detective on a case feels incidental to the plot, even though it is meant to be the entire premise of the novel. This results in a real lack of stakes in Hans’ chapters.

This is not helped by the general bloatedness of Hans’ story. The novel’s exploration of grief, though well written, seems to crop up entirely randomly and in a vacuum. Hans’ grief never influences his actions or perspectives in the novel. Hans’ narratives about grief, identity, and power feel entirely disjointed; he seems to become a different person depending on which of the three narratives the chapter at hand is concerned with.

Success story

This novel’s real success is in Kathryn’s story. She is a character who feels emotionally well rounded and you understand her instantly. Her feeling of disillusionment with the life she is expected to live, the way she is equal parts confused and enamoured by Sami life, and her sort of antagonistic relationship with the passage of time work really well with the novel’s experimental, ephemeral style. The way her slice of life narrative ends up playing into the larger police procedural story is expertly done and is a brilliant culmination of the atmosphere of intensity and mystery of her chapters.

Her chapters also have a brilliant sense of place; the isolated, snowy mountains of Finnmark are the perfect backdrop to both Kathryn’s internal story of identity and belonging, and make the historical narrative of the Alta Dam conflict come to life intimately.

The novel is clearly extremely well researched and deftly brings the reader into the unfamiliar worlds of both Oslo and Finnmark; the historical fiction aspect is incredibly immersive. In particular, the letters from Emilie, Hans’ “honorary [Sami] ancestor” are romantic and otherworldly and brilliantly mirror Kathryn’s narrative (pg. 39). Hans’ subsequent introspection into his own ancestry and his great uncle Turi, a man who wrote ideas considered to be radical by even some of the Sami people, are some of the most salient parts of the novel.

In an attempt to do everything in one story, many of the narrative and thematic elements of this story either fall flat, or simply never come together on page, but when the novel is honed in on Hans’ reinvestigation of his identity and Kathryn’s intense bildungsroman narrative, it really shines.

Thanks for engaging with our 2026 BSR Book Week! If you’re looking for a good read, be sure to check out our other book reviews, taking over the BSR site from May 17-23, 2026. On May 25, we return to our regular mix of covering theater, opera, music, visual art, dance, books, films, public events, and more. Subscribe to our weekly newsletters (never a paywall!), and you can support our independent nonprofit arts journalism with a gift of any size.