The Glitter Scene

June 27, 2011
Fagerholm's dense thriller demands second readingâif only to fill in the holes and put together the scattered pieces of her puzzle. In 2004, sensitive teenage Johanna lives with her aunt Solveig in a marshy seaside Finnish town still marked by the tragic events of Fagerholm's previous novel, The American Girl (a visiting girl's suspicious death, one lover's suicide, another's disillusionment). After Johanna digs into her family's connection to the tragedy, she learns the complicated history that led to the event, and the novel dips 15 years back to find Susette Packlén and Maj-Gun Maalamaa, two girls brought together by loss. They have a fraught friendship and a temporal connection to the American girl's death; this section (coyly subtitled "An entirely different story, or maybe not?") tracks the dangerous ripples that reverberate from acts of terror and love. Finally, Fagerholm returns to the original crime (and others) with an epilogue that provides some (not all) of the answers readers have been waiting for. These haunted characters reveal the effects of a tragedy on a small community. While the opaque stream-of-consciousness prose and bleak Scandinavian imagery can create inertia, the conclusion of The American Girl narrative will delight fans of the series.

July 1, 2011

First, Sweden gave us Stieg Larsson's girls who did things, and now it has sent us Fagerholm, whose previous novel, The American Girl, was a best seller and multiple prize winner there. Her new novel has murders and mysteries, but don't expect a tight--or even coherent--story line. Fagerholm's technique is to circle around a plot development, repeating incidents and phrases like taglines, incrementally adding small bits of information. The narrative is carried along in the mulling voices of several quirky, unlikable characters who live in the cryptically unnamed District on a marshy seacoast, evidently in the author's native Finland. One character may be a writer--it's hard to know for sure--but at one point she says her editor suggests that she "use self-pity productively, carry it to the extreme," which is an apt description of how Fagerholm approaches character and plot. VERDICT For those who like to puzzle over a challenging narrative. Most readers will find the novel almost incomprehensible, and as it is a sequel to The American Girl, one's only hope of understanding is to read them both.--Reba Leiding, James Madison Univ. Libs., Harrisonburg, VA

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2011
The Glitter Scene is a sequel to the award-winning Fagerholm's The American Girl (2010). Set 37 years after the events of that book, the companion novel brings readers up to date with the characters' lives and sheds additional light on a central mystery. The characters are eccentric and not totally likable, but the background information and motives Fagerholm provides allow them to be better understood, fostering reader empathy. Fagerholm adopts a dense, experimental style to tell this story, one that uses a great deal of repetition, includes many incomplete sentences and clauses, and delivers the same information from several points of view. Structure, too, is complex and interesting. The novel contains four sections, each focusing on a different character, whose story is told from differing perspectives. The challenge of reading such writing for the length of the book may discourage some readers. For literary readers and fans of its predecessor.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)