In Heart So Hungry, Pennsylvania author Randall Silvis takes Norman Mailer’s injunction that all writing is fiction to heart. The result, as Silvis admits, is a “hybrid of fact and fiction” based on a true historical incident. In 1905, Mina Hubbard and four companions crossed Labrador from the east coast to Ungava Bay, completing a journey that had killed her husband two years before. She became the first white woman to enter central Labrador and contact the First Nations peoples living there. In addition, she raced against, and handily beat, an expedition mounted by her late husband’s
co-explorer, Dillon Wallace.

Mina was an extraordinary woman. A highly dependent, subservient product of a late-Victorian upbringing, she appears to have lived largely within the strictures of her time. Yet, in response to a mild suggestion that her beloved husband might have been at fault in his expedition, she threw off the expectations of her gender and class to perform one remarkable feat.

Heart So Hungry is a complex love story – it was Mina’s love for her dead husband that drove her on, yet there are suggestions that she developed a relationship with one of her half-Cree companions – but it is also a tragedy and an epic. The combination makes for a wonderful tale.

Silvis knows how to develop character and craft scenes that draw readers into his story and help them understand the characters’ motives. But does he go too far? There is much imagined speech and speculation on interior dialogues. For example, on seeing a horse’s breath on a cold morning, Mina wonders about the appearance of the soul at the moment of death.

Mina is a fascinating combination of helpless sentimentalist and hardheaded realist. Silvis makes her and her companions live in this intensely readable and entertaining book. Individual readers must decide whether Silvis’s novelistic instincts have led him too far from non-fiction or whether he is accessing a broader truth to make the past come alive.