[Quote (re-)translated from my German copy.]

This is a tie-in product to a TV show called Northern Exposure that I know next to nothing about except that my mom apparently watched it when it ran on TV in the 90s. Apparently she bought this book at some point and somehow it ended up on my book shelf over time with me being mildly curious as to what kind of literature my mom, who never cared much for books, made an exception for.
When a challenge I'm doing with a friend included the category of "a book recommendation from your mom", this one became my pick for it.

Letters from Cicely has a couple things going for it that I actually found very intriguing going in. For one, the whole story being set in a small town of ice-cold Alaska is something I'm very much down for. The plot revolving about a strange phenomenon that keeps the inhabitants of that town awake for months is also pretty interesting. And lastly, the entire story being told through the letters the town's inhabitants send out to the rest of the world is a unique touch.
Unfortunately that's basically where my interests ended because the actual content of the book did not really agree with me.

The book, probably to stay true to its soap opera roots, is focused more on the bickering drama between the quirky characters than the plot. Problem is, I didn't really find a lot of these characters interesting and some of them even outright unlikeable. For example, the male protagonist Joel, who serves as the fish-out-of-water element by being a city doctor banished to work in this backwoods town, is insanely unlikeable. I get that a main-draw of the show was probably the will-they-won't-they back-and-forth between him and the town's local pilot, Maggie. But he is just such a despicable nonstop asshole that I couldn't find a single reason to believe that Maggie could give a rat's ass about him or think that I should root for Joel myself.
There is also this odd age-gap couple with an 18 years old girl being with a 63 years old man, which caught me off-guard when it came up the first time. Didn't really seem like there was much of a point to that either.

A major plot element is also that people just get unreasonable angry at other characters due to lack of sleep, which just resulted in even more bickering but with even less of a reason for it. That felt lazy and contrived. Especially since characters constantly recognize that they're angry at others for literally no good reason.
From what I gathered, this book is loosely based on a specific episode of the show where the town's inhabitants weren't able to sleep for a stretch of time due to different reasons than the ones in the book. I could see the extra aggravation make for some decent entertainment if you're already familiar with the characters and it only goes on for one brief episode. But in this book it was rather grating and felt very repetitive pretty quickly.

In the end, the strange situation resolves just as came on, and the story ends with the will-they-won't-they pair on one and the same page due to being victims of the same circumstance despite 250 pages of pure hatred between them both beforehand.
As someone who has no prior experience with this show, I feel more put off by it than I was before. Not that I think it sounds like the worst thing ever. But it does seem very quaint and not like my kind of humor at all. Maybe it needs the actual performances from the actors on the show to make the dialog work for me but in its written form, this didn't do much for me.
Bits of it felt like Twin Peaks without the good writing or interesting plot and given that that show is mentioned in this book at least ones, I wonder if that's actually somewhat intentional.

Anyway, this wasn't the most painful thing ever but I'm glad I got through this. I also can't blame my mom for not really remembering any of this these days. Maybe that's for the better. lol