Kathleen Winter: Boundless

Boundless is one of those books that I picked up because I really liked the cover and the subtitle of my edition read “Adventures in the Northwest Passage”, not “Tracing Land and Dream in a New Northwest Passage”. If it had been the latter, I may have hesitated. It was the adventure aspect that drew me to the book just as much as the cover.

Well, adventure in the sense that I expected was not the focus of this book, but it did stir my wanderlust and I did enjoy following Kathleen Winter’s travels along the Northwest Passage just as much as any other travelogue based on that area of the world.

Unlike some other travelogues, Winter used her trip as a time of introspection and to get to grips with some events in her life that needed closure. From this angle, there were quite a lot of parts that I was admittedly less interested in and that I did not really pay attention to because the constant introduction of new people, fellow travellers and people she meets on the way, did not provide much time and space to get invested in them.

However, as a general book to get a feel for this remote area of the world (Greenland and northern Canada) and, especially (I felt) the tourism industry in this part, it was interesting and even entertaining.