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In Anna, Like Thunder (Brindle & Glass), Peggy Herring fleshes out the story behind the historical events surrounding the 1808 shipwreck of the Russian trading ship, St. Nikolai, off the western shore of the Olympic Peninsula. The book is an intriguing read for those who wish to be immersed in the history of the Pacific Northwest. The novel is set during the height of Russian maritime exploration in the region. Already for half a century, European ships have roamed the coast of the Pacific Northwest in search of sea otter pelts, which make for “soft gold” in a transpacific trade network linking Britain, New Spain, the United States, Russia, China, Hawaii and various coastal Indigenous communities. The events that follow the shipwreck are presented through the eyes of Anna Petrovna Bulygina. She is from an aristocratic family in St. Petersburg and has chosen to follow her husband to Novo Arkhangelsk (Sitka, Alaska) as he pursues a career with the Russian-American Company. Having been socially insulated due to her highborn status, and being one of only two women in a crew of frontier-hardened men, Anna provides a special perspective that helps advance Herring’s postcolonial take on the history of settler colonialism. Anna, for example, begins to compare how she is taught to harvest with her husband’s envisioning of future exploitation of the resources in the region. I also enjoyed how Herring juxtaposes Russian folklore with vivid depictions of Makah, Quileute, and Hoh cultural practices and language. By doing so, she weaves together a robust account of contact. Of course, there are still your standard tragic mishaps due to miscommunication and misunderstandings. There are also seemingly irreconcilable differences. But because Herring goes beyond the typical boundaries for such narratives, this book’s historical imagining is more political than one might expect.
