Amanda Hellberg (1) (1973–)

This book has so much going for it, and then it just ... doesn't deliver. I loooove me some Swedish folklore, and I don't know what time of the year could be better to read a scary book about the Swedish summer than during the Swedish summer, but ... no. It's kinda scary, I'll give it that, I think that is one of the book's few strenghts, that and the mythology/folklore stuff.

The rest? Naah. I absolutely ABHOR books that have more than one POV, and this one manages to have them ALL, first, second and third person. I mean, FINE, I guess I can handle first and second if done well, but don't fucking mix first and third. Don't. Do. It. I've read very very VERY few books that worked with that.

The book also feels incredibly rushed? I get that it's for "a younger audience" (this means nothing for me, but apparently it's meant for ages 12-15 which I guess is the awkward stage between child and young adult, so I've tagged it as both), but I've read some children's fantasy books that are fucking AMAZING and well-written and well-paced, so I'm not going to excuse it on that account. The same goes for the subtley, which is non-existent, and you can pretty much guess the entire plot from the first few chapters. Literally nothing happens that doesn't magically tie into the plot just perfectly a page or so later.

This is the second book I'm reading from this author, and I wasn't really impressed by either of them, to be honest. I don't like her writing style and I don't like this hard-on for the UK she has, and it's just not my thing. But even worse than that, it violated one of my fave things about fantasy books for younger people, because it included RAPE as a plot point and NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO that's not fucking okay. It wasn't graphic or even described, but it was THERE and it was very important for what happened so I fucking hated that. Fuck.… (plus d'informations)

Maja Grå goes to Oxford to study illustration and is stalked by her dead mother’s ghost and a few other otherworldly beings. So, what's good? The writing. Hellberg is capable of putting sentences together artfully. What's not so good? The rest, unfortunately. Döden på en blek häst is part ghost story, part horror tale, part police procedural, part romance novel (including a rather cringe-worthy sex scene), part travel guide, part art history lecture, part abandonment story, part interior decoration class (including descriptions of every architectural feature in every building in Oxford), part Introduction to Illustration, part murder mystery, part splatter/gore story, part gothic fiction, part Attending College 101, and part restaurant guide.

It gets a bit too much for a mere 300 pages and the transitions from one type of story to the next are abrupt to say the least; one minute Maja is sharing her bed with a rotting corpse and the next happily sketching cartoons in class, one minute she’s assaulted by a dead body in her bathtub and the next rolling in the hay with suitably broody bad boy, Jack (turned good guy, obviously, in true romance novel form). The creepy parts are well written, but I wish Hellberg would have picked one solid story and stuck with it instead of trying to merge many rickety storylines into one.… (plus d'informations)