Yikes. A descent into madness for the entire family! ( )

I can’t believe it took me two weeks to finish this book, I gotta get back on top of my reading. And it wasn’t because it was bad, I just didn’t have the time or energy to read for some reason. Though had the book been amazing maybe that would’ve helped.

I mean, I enjoyed it, but … now that I’m finished with it I don’t know what it was trying to say to me. There were some supernatural elements in it but they were not explored at all and in a way maybe the book would’ve been better without them? Or maybe they weren’t there at all? I don’t know, honestly.

Since the characters were born just a few years after me I enjoyed reading about their online life, because it made me nostalgic for when I was growing up. I also really liked the friendship between the two girls for the same reason.

However the parts at Skansen (both the first page and the ending) just seemed over-the-top to me and there was a bit too much from the perspective of a pedophile for me to really praise this. ( )

Absolute buckets of blood and creepiness. ( )

Um.

The reviewers on the jacket would have you believe that John Ajvide Lindqvist is Sweden's Stephen King, and that may be so -- if King's Swedish editions are translated so poorly that large chunks of the book go by with nothing happening. (It is certainly true that they both could benefit from an undaunted editor.)

In a brutally small nutshell: Angst-y and mentally disturbed 14-year-old girls love music, feel alienated, want to kill people, and do. With drills and without the benefit of reader empathy. The End.

The only place this reader (who read this for work, or else would have abandoned it) truly felt cheered was on the final page, when it is strongly hinted that the girls are devoured by wolves.

Sorry. I thought it sucked. ( )

I am going to keep this short and sweet. I am honestly baffled how this made the top 20 list of scariest books out there. I was torn between boredom for a good 1/3 of this book and then just straight up baffled by the time I got to the end.

This story starts out with a man who finds a baby that is left for dead in a hole in plastic in the woods (did you follow that whole thing). Now don't think that you are going to find out why the baby was put there. Or even the backstory to the baby. Instead the book goes into the past of the man who finds the baby (Lennart) and his anger at his wife (Laila) and the disappointment with his son (Jerry). We find out Lennart and Laila were a rising singing duo in Sweden before they failed to make the charts on their newest song.

Lennart is just..I don't even know. I got the sense he felt his whole life was him being wronged and he lashed out at everyone around him. So for him to find a baby and think that keeping it in the basement where he would let no one around it and he would only teach her music that was "pure" because he realized that the baby had a special ability to sing perfectly (also how the hell do newborns or thereabouts sing?) was his ticket to something. I don't know.

I actually did like Laila a bit better than Lennart. I guess I was more confused about what made her stay. She went from one extreme to the other in the book.

Jerry I felt indifferent towards until things picked up after the halfway point.

We also have the baby which is called Little One, Theres and then Tesla as she grows. Don't think reading this book is going to give you any insights into her. I really don't get what she is supposed to be (some type of vampire, ghoul, etc.?)

The book then shifts other to following the family of a newborn girl named Theresa. We have Theresa who does not fit in with her family, who is okay with that after she meets a boy named Johannes. Theresa and Johannes are able to fill each other up in a way there home life does not allow. Until one day Theresa finds she is left behind and feels more apart, until she sees a girl singing on the show "Idol".

There is just so much going on here that I can't really unpack. I think that breaking up the book into so many different sections that had us following Theres, then Theresa, then Jerry, then Theresa, etc didn't help matters any.

We also have so many other characters in this book it was hard to track them all. I ended up really hating Theresa more than Theres though by the end of this book. At least you could excuse Theres for having a really messed up mindset towards big people (adults), but Theresa did not have that excuse. Her final act before going along with a plan thought up by Theres actually ticked me off.

The writing just turned me off halfway through, it was just gruesome after a while and reading how other people were murdering/hurting others just made me a bit sick.

The flow was off. I think it's because there was so much time spent on setting up the backstories to these girls and we stay focused on people who in the end didn't matter to the main story at all (or at least I didn't think they mattered) I found myself bored.

I would have just DNFed it, if it wasn't on one of my must read lists. ( )