March 13, 2017
Ella Nygaard, the heroine of this devastating solo debut from Danish author Friis (coauthor of The Boy in the Suitcase and three other Nina Borg novels), was seven when her father allegedly murdered her mother. Some believe that Ella was a witness, but she can’t remember the crime; in fact, she can’t recall anything prior to her subsequent placement in the foster system. Now a 28-year-old single mother, Ella suffers from severe PTSD. When she’s hospitalized after an especially debilitating episode, the government assumes custody of her 11-year-old son, Alex, and tells Ella they need to re-evaluate her parental competence. Ella panics, kidnaps Alex, and decamps to Klitmøller, the remote coastal village where she grew up. Ella’s efforts to unlock her memories and regain control of her life are interspersed with flashbacks to 1994, told from her parents’ perspectives. Emotionally complex characters complement the intricate plot, which reflects on the interconnectivity of poverty, substance abuse, and mental illness. The pace is deliberate, but Friis’s writing is propulsive, and the book’s twisty conclusion will shock and gratify.
March 1, 2017
The scars of childhood trauma run deep for Ella Nygaard, but when she's forced to confront her past, she discovers that the truth may be as hard to pin down as her own memories."Angry" and "confrontational" would be kind ways to describe Ella, a ward of the state who bounced around a series of Danish foster homes beginning when she was 7 and her father murdered her mother. Now 28, with a nearly 12-year-old son, Alex, Ella lives on the dole outside Copenhagen and is occasionally beset by debilitating panic attacks that land her in the psych ward. After a particularly nasty one--it doesn't help that she tries to quash the feelings with vodka--the state places Alex in a seemingly idyllic foster home in the country. Ella, even though she knows her limitations as a mother and as someone who's barely able to function in society, can't stand the thought of him in care, and she snatches him away to her childhood home of Klitmoller in remote Jutland. Though Ella vehemently denies remembering anything about her mother's murder or almost anything else from that time, being back home makes her think for the first time that there could be a benefit to accessing those buried memories, especially when her grandmother starts professing Ella's father's innocence. Friis, best known for her collaborations with fellow Dane Lene Kaaberbol on the Nina Borg series (The Considerate Killer, 2016, etc.), expertly weaves Ella's current life with the days and weeks leading up to the crime, giving readers a glimpse into the psyche of her undeniably depressed mother and her perhaps misunderstood but hardly blameless father. A deeply resonant tale about one woman's attempts to embrace her past while setting herself free.
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April 1, 2017
Ella Nygaard, 27, has suffered from memory loss for 20 years since her father was convicted of murdering her mother and she became a ward of the state. After a lifetime of poor choices and an incapacitating PTSD episode, she discovers her 11-year-old son, Alex, has been placed in a foster home. When Ella kidnaps Alex and takes shelter in her grandmother's abandoned house in an isolated coastal town in northern Denmark, she slowly begins to remember what actually happened when her mother died. With the help of Thomas, a childhood friend, and offbeat new acquaintance Barbara, Ella learns to fight her old demons. Interspersing chapters detail the backstory of Ella's parents, which reveal the damaging effects of virulent religion and a devastating love triangle that may harm Ella and Alex in the present. VERDICTMaking her solo debut, the coauthor of the "Nina Borg" (The Boy in the Suitcase) series not surprisingly has written a dark, fast-paced, and compelling mystery that will fascinate aficionados of Nordic noir.--ACT
Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from April 15, 2017
Ella Nygaard's father was convicted of murdering her mother when Ella was seven years old, leaving her in a series of disastrous foster homes. Now a single mother rendered virtually unemployable by panic attacks that often land her in the psychiatric ward, Ella faces losing her son to the same system. Realizing that she has to confront her childhood nightmare, Ella kidnaps Alex from his foster home and takes him to the Danish coastal town where her mother was killed. She abandons years of determined refusal and agrees to live in her grandmother's empty home, painfully aware that her grandmother hopes to mine her memories for evidence of her father's innocence. Her grandmother will be disappointed; Ella has no memories of that night. But, as she slowly opens herself to Barbara, the town's alcoholic resident artist, and Thomas, her closest childhood friend, Ella finds that her mind is slowly releasing glimpses of her family's last night that don't fit the evidence given at her father's trial. Ella's parents' voices are threaded throughout, moving slowly toward the murder and introducing foreboding elements such as her mother's involvement in a darkly zealous religious group, hints of mental illness, and her father's infidelity. The skillfully calibrated atmospheric tension and Ella's realistically awkward struggle toward redemption will appeal to fans of literary suspense like that of Jennifer McMahon and Karin Fossum.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)