Synopsis: 12-year-old Oskar is an outsider; bullied at school, dreaming about his absentee father, bored with live on a dreary housing estate. One evining he meets his mysteriour neighbour Eli. As a romance blossoms between them, Oskar dicovers Eli's dark secret - she's a 200-year-old vampire, forever frozen in chidhood and condemned to live on a diet of fress blood.
It could very well be another vampire story but the author achieves in fact a disturbing reworkin of the vampire legend, and a deeply moving fable about rejection, friendship and loyalty, and shows a vampire both heart-breakingly pathetic and terrifying. The book is a bevy of contradictions: beauty and horror, young love and violence, innocence and guilt. The fact that it works at all is impressive, being as it is part love story, horror novel and social drama.
After this one, I'm reading Handling the Undead. I'll tell you something about this one as soon as I finish it but my first impression is that this one is even a more disturbing and ill-at-ease reading.
Ok, Ron, I confess. When u told me u were reading this I thought: another gal that surrenders to those silly vampire novel in vogue. Such a hard time to find the bloody book, besides. I was sure I was losing miserably my precious time. And yessssssss, I waz wrong, babe, u could have saved me the "I told u" recrimination but... I guess sometimes I forget u're a girl, don't I? :-b
ReplyDeleteOh,yes, man, she's a girl all right, I seem to recall :-P
ReplyDeleteSorry, but not my genre. Everyone says this is moving and philosophical but I got bored all along the book and I'm not ashamed to confess that I didn't understand the end not like it. The next one, Handling the undead, I'm as yet reading it so, please, Ron, wait a couple of days so I have time to finish it and pick on it, although I seem to be enjoying this one.
Suburb in Stockholm full of people trying to do the right thing, plenty of good intentions everywhere in a sad place, lived by aimless people. People divided between children and adults, succesful and failures, victims and victimizers. I loved this one from the start, could have been me, that Oskar if I had been a boy and someone like Eli would have crossed my path.
ReplyDeleteI loved the book, personally
ReplyDeleteHey, wellcome, Heinrich! Willkommen? When I saw you following what first came to my mind was that you were named after Dune's noble family, but then a friend told me that it was always a finnish surname and an american post-hardcore band so I'm still guessing. Now I'm reading the two first John Connolly books in the Charlie Parker's series, but those are detective books, serial killers and stuff and not sci-fi nor fantasy so I feel there's no room for them in this blog and I was thinking about a masterpiece and tilting towards Dune which is undoubtedly one of my favorite ones.
ReplyDeleteHi ronroria, Dune is also one of my favorite sagas, I speak 5 languages and i have books in german, french, english, spanish and italian and definitively science fiction is my favorite book genre, i also write my own books and stories like my first book Goodbye Earth. im 14 and im german. When i read Lat den ratte komma in I found an strange part of myself that I didn't haven't found until then, I read it by recomendation of a friend
ReplyDeleteNice blog thanks for posting
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