Leider fällt es mir bei Maja Lundes Schreibstil schwer, einen emotionalen Zugang zu den Charakteren zu finden. Sie bleiben mir fremd, weshalb auch ihre Erlebnisse keine Reaktion bei mir auslösen wie das bei anderen Autor*innen der Fall ist. 

In allen drei Zeitebenen des Buches haben die Charaktere extreme Schwierigkeiten damit, ihre Gefühle ((Mutter)Liebe, Sorgen, Angst, etc.) zu kommunizieren. Das führte bei mir schnell zu Frustration. 

In Bezug auf die Pferde kam mir die Debatte zu kurz, ob die Jagd im 19. Jahrhundert nicht erst dazu geführt hat, dass die Wildpferde fast ausgestorben sind. Bzw im allgemeinen die Auswirkungen der Einmischung des Menschen. 

 I have listened to this second book by Maja Lunde, and I really enjoy her flavor of climate fiction. However, this book didn't work as well for me as her previous book, The End of the Ocean.

The foundation of this book is a species of wild horses found in Mongolia. On this foundation, three stories are built: a nineteenth-century man who travels to Mongolia to bring horses back to Russia, a late twentieth-century German veterinarian who is working to return the horses to Mongolia, a Norwegian woman four decades in the future who is trying to save not only the last of the wild horses but also her and her daughter's life. Through these three lenses, we see the effort to save a population. Sometimes that population is the wild horses of Mongolia, and sometimes it is humanity.

While I found the story interesting, I felt this book bloated. Her previous book had 2 different timelines, and it was a much more streamlined experience. Three timelines are just one too many, and I felt that Mikhail's story was superfluous. While Karin's and Eva's stories work well together, Mikhail's just seems out of place. Every time Lunde cut to his story, I was immediately taken out of the story.

This book would have been much more impactful if it were just 2/3 of its current form. However, the 2/3 of the book that did work made this a worthwhile, if imperfect, read for me. 

I think this might deserve a higher rating if I hadn't read it through a very stressful time. I've been reading it sporadically for over a month which doesn't reflect on how much I enjoyed it. This book, more than the others in the series, is more eerie and feels closer to today's reality. There's a sense of hopelessness in each storyline, but Lunde balances it with heartwarming moments in the different character arcs.