etc.

This book was an airport impulse purchase, selected in a hastened and panicked state from racks holding various Grisham, Steele, and Le Carré releases. You can just imagine my indecision. It is about the relationship between Ingrid and Astrid Magnussen, a mother and daughter pair with pale, Nordic lineage who carve out an at once poetic and violent destiny for themselves. As promising as that sounds, their lives are in fact as bloodless as their lineage. Ingrid, once a woman scorned, gets imprisoned for killing an ex-lover, and Astrid is therefore left to the state child placement system, with disastrous consequences. While most of the narrative focuses on Astrid’s plight, the meat of the tale revolves around the love-hate relationship between mother and daughter. All jacket accounts call this a “lyric” and “poetic” book, but I found it too precious, with characters that are poorly sketched, and an ending that seemed to betray at least 2/3 of what went before it. The moral of the story, of course, is don’t get caught in an airport at the start of a ten hour journey with nothing to read.