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July 22, 2019
This lean, moving novel from Knausgärd (The Helios Disaster) explores the inner life of a child who has decided to stop talking. When the story begins, adolescent Ellen
reveals that she prayed for her mentally ill father to die, just before he died. The family is still in recovery. Her brother is abusive—some early scenes of physical violence are disturbing—and her mother, an attractive actress, oscillates through the house with giddy energy. The action tracks a tumultuous school year, as the girl’s brother and mother each meet a new love and Ellen sinks ever deeper into the stubborn muteness of her own making. There are sequences of happy memories, but the girl’s father is a specter lurking in the background. The narrative is borderline stream-of-consciousness, with hallucinations mingling with reality, forcing readers to constantly question what they are told. Knausgärd is an impressive writer, and she has created a unique, powerful lead in a world all her own.

July 1, 2019
A girl gives her dysfunctional family an extreme and distressing version of the silent treatment. Ellen, the narrator of the second novel by Bostr�m Knausg�rd and first published in the U.S., is certain she's killed her father, because she constantly prayed for his death. "I had access to God. It was me and God who'd killed my dad," she tells us early on. That line is more than enough reason to fire up the "Unreliable Narrator" siren, but Bostr�m Knausg�rd encourages the reader not to dismiss her situation as madness but empathize with it as trauma. Ellen's mentally ill father has been institutionalized and may have tried to kill the family by leaving the gas on; her brother is angry and abusive; her mother, an actress, is distant and narcissistic. (The title refers to her in a role as a "fallen Statue of Liberty.") In that light, Ellen's silence (and this book) represents a protective carapace against an adulthood she associates with pain: "I stopped talking when growing began to take up too much space inside me. I was sure I couldn't do both, grow and talk at the same time." The mood intensifies as Ellen's mother and brother pursue their own relationships, but the novel doesn't have an arc so much as a set of fuguelike variations on Ellen's musings about death and loss. Bostr�m Knausg�rd's writing (via Aitken's translation) is crystalline and careful; like her ex-husband, Karl Ove Knausg�rd, she has an eye for quotidian but revealing details, though she eschews his expansiveness. Here, restraint and ambiguity prevail, whether it's about the intensity of the abuse Ellen sustained or the veracity of her assertions. Regardless, it's a taut portrait of how difficult it can be to reconcile ideals about faith and family with their messier realities. An intense, recursive book that evokes the chill despair of a Bergman film.

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August 1, 2019
Since 11-year-old narrator Ellen prayed for her father to die, and he did, she's certain both that God is real, and that she's responsible for her father's death. She keeps these beliefs to herself, though, having stopped speaking, writing, or even communicating with gestures: a troubling inconvenience her mother, brother, and teachers nonetheless seem to tolerate, for now. Readers come to understand that Ellen and her family had reasons for wanting to be free of her father, and that he, perhaps, wanted to be free of himself. Winner of the Swedish August Prize, Knausg�rd's second novel (her first, The Helios Disaster, will be released in English in 2020) gives voice to the uncontrollable, horrifying aspects of growing up. Ellen doesn't quite understand why her life force might be so compromised, but she does find power, pride, and a kind of freedom in her silence. Readers familiar with Karl Ove Knausgaard's autobiographical My Struggle series will recognize Linda Bostr�m as its author's ex-wife, adding further intrigue to this quietly bold tale of familial terror and love.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)