I had mixed feelings about Suvanto. There's not quite enough action -- I don't mean shootouts or knife fights but regular old things that move a story -- or resolution to go with all the atmosphere and build up.

(I wrote about the book on my blog here.) ( )

A refreshingly different novel that had the atmosphere of a Finnish winter, claustrophobic, dark and cold. We are at the Suvanto hospital and on the upper floor are foreign privileged women whose husbands are working in Finland and who are ill, lonely, have mental health issues or all three. Nurse Sunny is in charge of this ward of women and she too has fled from her past to hide in this hospital. She hides herself and her emotions. Beautiful descriptions of the weather, the sauna rituals, the women talking. Well written and thoroughly enjoyable read. If you find the pace slow at first stick with it and your persistence will be rewarded. ( )

Maile Chapman's dark and surprising first novel, YOUR PRESENCE IS REQUESTED AT SUVARNO, is a slow-burning cauldron of evil. I had never heard of Chapman, but she is obviously a young woman wise beyond her years and will, to my mind, be a literary voice well worth watching. And what a voice it is.

The novel is like nothing I've ever read before, with an epigraph from Euripides' THE BACCHAE, the appropriateness of which only becomes clear deep into the story with a mysterious and savage act, preceded by a surrealistic scene in which the privileged and spoiled "up-patient" women of the Suvanto hospital/rest home stand on the icy shore of a frozen bay watching the passage of a comet, mourning the sudden loss of one of their number. "Poor Julia" is repeated among them, "so that Julia's name is heard like the crying of a flock of geese overhead in the darkness ..."

I could almost hear the ululating mournful cries, and sense the loss they felt, and suddenly that Greek epigraph applied, with its "gleam of awesome fire in heaven" and women who "stood straight up, with staring eyes."

Chapman has created a cast of complex and memorable characters with American nurse Sunny Taylor and resident-patients Julia Day, Pearl Webb, Mary Minder, and Laimi Lehti. The long nights of 1920s northern Finland are a setting worthy of Poe (or, in our own time, perhaps Stephen King), but Greek tragedy has also heavily influenced Chapman, both in story and in style. Because, in addition to the overarching omniscient narrator voice, the reader also gets lengthy passages in the second person, and, perhaps more importantly, from the "we" viewpoint, suggesting the women patients in the role of Greek chorus, watching and commenting as the events slowly and inexorably unfold.

It's been over forty years since I read Euripides, but Chapman's take on that ancient Greek playwright makes me want to revisit his work.

I would urge readers who may at first be impatient with the pace of the novel to persevere. Because it picks up and begins to roll rapidly downhill to a chilling and horrifying conclusion you could not have guessed and will not soon forget. This is simply one hell of a good read that leaves you with much to think about. Highly recommended. ( )

Set in Finland in the 1920s, Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto takes us into life at a convalescent hospital. Sunny Taylor is an American nurse in charge of the patients on a floor where the illnesses are not as serious and where an underlying tension builds as the winter deepens. This book is all about atmosphere. I had a sense of unease throughout the entire book. Chapman spends much of the book creating tension. The plot doesn't really get rolling until the final third of the book. But the atmosphere was enough to pull me back into the book every night. ( )