I needed a break from all that Narnia. This book had been on my radar for a few years now, and the price was finally right online so I ordered it.
This was an amazing debut. Only around 250 pages, but it felt so much longer, in a really good way. There was a lot of everything, facts and emotions, between the covers, but the pacing was brilliant in that it never felt rushed or too slow. At first I had fear that switching between the main character and his mother as narrator was going to detract from the focus, but it was exactly this that kept the pacing even, and allowed for decades of time and totally different experiences to be described in detail without feeling overwhelming.
I also thought of how the novel would work if the first half was the mother’s story, and the end of her narrative catching up to the beginning of the son’s in the second half, but enjoyed the original presentation nonetheless.
Eagerly awaiting his second novel in the upcoming months.
My only real complaint is that the cover image of The Cat, doesn’t match the description of The Cat in the book. Would it really have been that difficult to portray the character accurately? When he’s described so vividly. Not doing that homework seems sloppy on the part of the designer.
Our eldest children started going to school. When it turned out that children in Finland are entitled to preschool education even before they start school, I was so happy that I could hardly believe it was true. I was afraid they might send the children back home and say there was no good reason why my children should be at preschool.
Because Finnish women had jobs, they didn’t have time to stay at home with their children, and so they let other people take care of them. When I heard that children as young as eighteen can move away from home, I was shocked. What kind of person is an eighteen-year-old? What does an eighteen-year-old know about life? Nothing whatsoever.
Every day I sent my children to school and preschool slightly early and collected them late in the afternoon. All my spare time I spent sleeping. I couldn’t get enough of it. It was as though I was addicted to killing time: the time until my husband would come home again and leave again. 151
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