Novels with crazy premises : Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name

Novels with wacky premises, or, I've seen too much TV: exhibit A., Vandela Vida's "Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name." I love the allusive title, and I'm drawn to anything about northern Scandinavia (when will I learn?, after disappointments from the ballyhooed Stieg Larsson and from the unreadable Nobelist Haldor Laxness), but the tone of the book belies the title and the setting, a snappy, snarky, first-person account in very short (enumerated) segments of a young woman's quest to find her father (and perhaps her mother?) in Lapland. The contrast within the novel, what will make it work if Vida can sustain the tone, is the tension between this woman's odd, romantic quest and her embittered tone of voice, sexual, aggressive, sarcastic. Improbably, the 29ish narrator looks through papers on her father's death and discovers that the man who raised her was not her birth father - he had been someone (I guess) in northern Finland. Perhaps that's where her mother - who disappeared without a trace 15 years back - has gone? Oddly, many people, including narrator's fiance, have known about her parentage. This seems wildly improbable, also that this woman, even in the throes of grief, would abandon everything in her life, including fiance, to blindly search for her father. In first segment (cleverly titled Be Loved from misspelled floral display at funeral) narrator arrives in Helsinki and gets picked up (in both senses) by airport shuttle driver - one-night stand collapses as he falls drunk on the bathroom floor. That's one way to resolve a tricky plot element. What exactly is her personality? Would she really throw so much of her life away, and why?