Silje Ulstein

I bought this book from the local bookstore as it was the choice for this month’s NotYour Big 5 book club.
The book was extremely readable and a page turner. However, it was deeply disturbing to me which is why I only gave it 3 and 1/2 stars.
Miriam/Liv/Sara reinvents herself over and over again. Liv buys the snake, Nero, and she loves the snake but it kills someone. A lot of death ensues. Years later, remade as Miriam, her daughter is kidnapped.
Roe is the policeman who had a daughter and granddaughter caught up in all the death mentioned above.
The book slowly unfolds this story of whom killed who and why.
Compelling, readable yet disturbing.… (mehr)

This Norwegian thriller is set in two time periods, 13 years apart. In the town of Aleslund in 2003, flatmates Liv and two guys, Egil and Ingvar are living a life of drugs and partying, when on a whim they acquire a Burmese python they name Nero. Nero soon becomes exclusively Liv's, and she obsesses about the snake, feels she can communicate with the snake, and engages in increasingly bizarre behavior.

Fast forward to 2017 to a nearby town when the preteen daughter of prominent businesswoman Mariam Lind and her politician husband goes missing. The detective assigned to the case, Roe, used to live in Aleslund, and lost his daughter and granddaughter in a tragic house fire there. He suspects there may be a connection between the missing child and his own daughter's death.

The story is told through multiple narrators, including even the snake, and there are lots of twists and turns. I found this to be an intriguing Nordic crime novel.

3 stars… (mehr)

'Reptile Memoirs' called to me. I loved the title and the setting in small-town Norway and the dual timeline storytelling technique. I was looking forward to uncovering the dark secrets of the main characters and watching the two timelines dovetail in surprising but satisfying ways.

Unfortunately, I just couldn't settle into this book and let it flow through my imagination and I ended up reluctantly setting it aside a quarter of the way through, before the main investigation had even begun.

As I'd expected, the story was grim and a little twisted, with broken characters who relate to the world in unusual and dysfunctional ways. I was curious about the young woman with sexual abuse in her background who can find intense connection and relief only with a darkly beautiful snake and the emotionally distant woman who cannot quite take in the reality that her daughter is missing.

But curiosity isn't enough to get me through a dark novel full of pain. If that's all there is, then reading starts to feel voyeuristic and empty. I need to connect with the characters and I found I couldn't do that. They didn't seem real to me and if they were real, I didn't care what happened to them.

The movement back and forth between the two timelines and the perspectives of the two main characters felt a little choppy, disrupting my imagination without adding any tension.

I imagine that the hard-to-empathise-with characters and the slightly jarring transitions between timelines were deliberate devices, intended to make the book edgy and to keep the reader from getting too comfortable and safe, to get the reader to share some of the sense of dislocation that both main characters experience.

I realised that, although I could see how the book worked and admire the design, I wasn't enjoying myself so I decided that 'Reptile Memoirs' wasn't for me.
… (mehr)