After an invitation to speak at Raptus Comic Fest in Bergen, Norway, Knisley takes the opportunity to plan a trip around Europe to visit friends and family. Over the course of her travels she struggles with past relationships, work, and an uncertain future. She spends pages analyzing her love life, both with her ex John, and her current beau Henrik. What makes this difficult for her is that she still has feelings for John that she can’t seem to move past, and yet she knows […]
Growing up (in the north of Sweden) is hard to do
Matti grows up in a tiny town in the remote north of Sweden in the 1960s and 70s. The chapters in this book are more like little short stories about different aspects of his childhood and adolescence, chronicled with humour and the occasional forays into strange, magical realism-inspired fantasy sequences. The inhabitants of his town and the surrounding areas seem to be either deeply puritanically religious or Communists, not caring for the trappings of religion at all. The gruff and peculiar inhabitants are set in […]
Fear is the Original Sin
I have a fondness in my heart for Canada as a result of repeated readings of L.M. Montgomery’s Ann of Green Gables series during my childhood. Canada seemed like the opposite of Texas – cool, green, and full of people who loved you because you were difficult. I stopped reading Ann of Green Gables as a teen, but I would list it as a series that shaped my life. At no point, however, had it ever occurred to me that the author might have had […]
All Hail Russo!
Richard Russo is one of my favorite authors. His ability to take you on a meandering tale, and keep you engaged, is unparalleled. He is a true master storyteller and one of a kind. I read his later novels first but this, his second book, holds up against all the rest. Though I was never a real fan of the series Russo’s writing always reminds me of Seinfeld, the show about nothing. There are never any grand plot twists: his novels are about the simplicity […]