Kirk Kjeldsen

Simply written with very little dialogue, yet this book manages to convey a sense of how it was for rural Norwegians during the occupation in WWII, and a good impression of a teenage girl, her father, and the American pilot she assisted.

Kari finds a pilot hanging from his parachute a little distance from his plane. Her fifteen-year-old head swimming with visions of movie stars and adolescent romantic dreams, she offers to lead him to the Swedish border.

This is no small feat. Norway is occupied and German soldiers are everywhere. Kari and her father tend a small herd of animals and have very little to eat or for their animals to eat. Their savings is a small handful of coins. Kari has been chafing against the confines of the small village for some time, though, and is ready to move. In the middle of the night she grabs most of the money, takes the horse and a small wagon with what little she can bring.

While she and the American, Lance, head off, she is not thinking of what her father might do or what opportunistic neighbors might do. Trying to find the American are the Germans and a neighbor, and trying to find Kari is her father. The snow both helps and hurts Kari and Lance and the horse as they ride, rest, sleep, ride some more.

The journey becomes, for us readers, increasingly tense. This tension builds as the pursuers close in.

Well-written, with sufficient detail for us to feel the cold, see the desolation, sense the fear. This would make a good starter novel for those interested in the lives of the occupied during WWII and a good novel in general for those of us who have been reading for a long time.… (mehr)

America is no more. It has collapsed, politically and economically. Job, a teenager living in the Pacific Northwest with his older brother, has just learned that his mother is not dead. She abandoned her sons several years previously, and went to look for work in China, untouched by the collapse.

He gets on a train to the Free State of San Francisco. Job, and a bunch of other refugees, gets on a fishing boat for a very illegal trip across the Pacific. It is a harrowing trip, stuck in the dark, stinking hold of the boat. When they reach China, Job is handed over to a man who takes him to a factory near the city of Chongqing. It is the sort of place surrounded by a chain link fence with barbed wire on top. The hours are long and dangerous, the food is meager and the pay is mostly non-existent.

After a year, Job escapes the factory and moves from job to job. He spends every spare moment showing an old picture (the only one he has) at every factory he can find in Chongqing. He eventually gets a job as a motorbike delivery driver. The food and pay are decent, and it lets him spread out to more factories. He learns that he ought to start looking for his mother in the city's brothels and whorehouses. After several more months, he sees a woman who looks a lot like his mother. He runs after her.

This is an excellent Young Adult novel. The author does a very good job from start to finish. I wonder if this is the sort of thing experienced by Latin American refugees coming to America (before the recent refugee flood). It is very much recommended.… (mehr)

Having enjoyed Kirk Kjeldsen’s second novel, a taut historical thriller Land of Hidden Fires, I was keen to experience his latest offering The Depths.

What I find refreshing about Kjeldsen’s writing is his no-nonsense approach, the immediacy and directness of his prose. This is an author that really values a reader’s time and writes with their experience front of mind. That’s not to say The Depths prose is spare, quite the opposite in fact — the word selection simply judicious. Kjeldsen displays a real talent for swiftly encapsulating the mood between characters with evocative metaphor and simile. Read full review >>… (mehr)