Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #465177 in Books
• Published on: 1997-10
• Original language: Icelandic
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 152 pages

Customer Reviews

Beautifully written and completely lacking in clichés.
A nameless girl from Reykjavik is traveling away from home for the first time of her life. She is all alone, only 9 and already overwhelmed by homesickness. Her parents are sending her to the country as a punishment for shoplifting. She is to stay at a farm all summer and earn her keep by working there. The farmer and his wife are indifferent, distant people. The farmhand is lonely and obsessed by sex and no fit companion for a little girl. The rebellious daughter (back from university) has her own problems and demons. Country life is not all that idyllic.
The girl is aware that she has done something wrong and tries to take her utterly unfamiliar new world as it comes. The author makes us see this world through the eyes of a child who is not yet capable of analysis and introspection. She experiences her surrounding mainly through the senses and attempts to make sense of it by means of her imagination.
The world she has been exiled to may be rather harsh but in the landscape and the animals there is also poetry. Her only means of escape therefore is using her fantasy. Beautifully written and completely lacking in clichés.