Heartfelt and emotional, this book evokes many emotions as Elin’s story is told. Elin lives in NYC, often putting her career before her husband, Sam and daughter, Alice. What they don’t know is Elin’s history of poverty in Sweden, emotional abuse, and tragedy that have shaped her masked approach to her private life. I was engrossed in Elin’s story, and recommend this well written, and at times, heart wrenching novel. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

“A Question Mark is Half a Heart” by Sophia Lundberg is a story of time, forgiveness, and ultimately love. As Elin Boals looks back on her childhood and marriage, she begins to see cracks and heartbreak. While she has been trying to make everything perfect, old wounds tear open and leave Elin feeling raw and broken. Forced to deal with her memories and feelings, Elin and her daughter eventually return to Elin’s childhood home and learn more about Elin than either had ever known.

This book is definitely interesting. A study into the mind of childhood trauma, we see Elin as a realistic character who has regrets and guilt that she carries with her. These old feelings permeate her adult life and have molded the world that her family lives in- a world of mistrust and lies. As everything begins to crumble, Elin is forced to look her fears in the eyes and go back to a place she felt she ruined. As painful as that is, it gives the story a clarity and wholeness that is satisfying to read.

My only struggle with this book was the slow start. In the beginning, Elin feels very one dimensional and hard to read. Her perfection is apparent so when her adult life begins to fall apart, it is harder to have sympathy for her. It took me a while to get into the story.

Overall, I gave this book 3 stars. I felt like the flashbacks were more interesting than the present day and Elin, although interesting, could have used a little more fleshing out as an adult. The ending was satisfying and seemingly sweet, but it was missing that something to put it over the edge for me…

Thanks to NetGalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for the ARC in exchange for my honest review!

Elin has the perfect life. A successful photographer, she lives in New York with her husband Sam and their seventeen-year-old daughter, Alice.
But something has always been missing…
When Elin receives a letter from her childhood friend Fredrik on the Swedish island of Gotland, memories come flooding back: of a past she has tried to forget, and a terrible secret she has shared with nobody - a secret that made her flee the island, and never return.

I was so excited for this book. The title was so thought provoking and intriguing and the cover instantly caught my eye when I saw it. In chapter one, I found the writing to be almost poetic and lyrical, which I loved, however, I didn’t find this to continue in the same way throughout the entirety of the story. And while I wanted to find out the big secret of the book, I didn’t find that I was as engaged with the story or connected with the characters as I wanted to be. The pace of the story felt slower to me that I expected or wanted. All this being said, I can see why some loved this book, and I still want to read other books by the author, of which I’ve heard some great things!

I received a free e-ARC through Netgalley.
Elin is a well-known photographer who works constantly and is losing her family over it. The book shows us in flashbacks what Elin's childhood was like and how she escaped--things that her husband and daughter know nothing about. Elin has to come to terms with the past to salvage her future. A sometimes haunting book on coming to terms with our pasts.

I am a huge fan of Sofia Lundberg's The Red Address Book so I was excited to pick up "A Questions Mark Is Half A Heart". Sadly, this left me feeling depressed and rather apathetic.

Split between the past and the present, Elin deals with her difficult childhood and mother at the same time as dealing with her daughter going off to college.

It feels like a mid-life book without a happy ending.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the opportunity to read and review this book

I received this novel as a free ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This family saga takes place from New York to Sweden and many places in between. At times mysterious and others divulging secrets, this novel was engaging.

3 1/2 ⭐️‘s
After a traumatic childhood, Elin runs away and reinvents herself. Years later she’s a famous photographer, living in New York with her husband and daughter. When she receives a letter from someone in her past, things start to spiral until she faces the past head on and finds out that running away isn’t always the right answer.

I loved The Red Address Book by Sofia Lundberg and was so pleased to see she had another book coming out. This one was just as good and as engaging as the first. I don't know what it is about Ms. Lundberg's writing that sucks me in. Nothing really exciting happens for the first half of the book, it's really just regular life, family and love but she has such an eloquent way of putting it. But then the last half of the book.....

...What an absolutely gutting (in a good way) book. The impact of people on one another, the way we carry our baggage from place to place adding more with every relationship like the worst possible souvenirs, how we fail to communicate who we are and what we want, how we don’t know those things because we don’t always know ourselves, how we can become redeemed in the love and loving of another person. You either get this book on an emotional level or you don't...I couldn’t put it down.

What a great character Erin is. A successful photographer, she lives in NYC with her husband and their 17 year old daughter.

She seems to have the perfect life until one day she receives a letter, from a long lost friend who lives in Sweden. The last time she was there a terrible thing happened she fled the island and now her past has come to haunt her.

Wrote across two timelines we see Elin in the past with hardly anything struggling to survive, and Elin present day, her daughter off at college and she is throwing herself into work.

Tension mounts and Elin will be forced to make a decisons, stay or run again.

I was so into this book to start with and then I kinda lost myself in the middle. it seemed slow. Things did pick up again.
Set in 1970s Sweden when Elin was an immigrant I could see why the author took time to develop the character.
As we watched Elin go through a healing process the story was quite sad.

This is a slow burner for those who enjoy this kinda read they will love it.
For me I like a faster paced book.

I would definitely read more in the future.

Sadly, this book wasn't for me.. I really liked the cover of the book and the description, but I found the pace a bit too slow for my liking and I didn't connect with any of the characters. It wasn't my cup of tea!

It took a very long time for me to be invested in the book. I did not really enjoy Elin`s character at first. At first she annoyed me and made me really bored. But as the story continued i found myself somwhat invested, though the ending felt rushed and it did not fit. Espesially since Sam and Elin has marriage problems and it felt like it suddenly was alright, because of Elin`s childhood and what happend and why.. It did not sit too right with me. Though it was interesting and i really liked Alice`s character.

It definitely took me some time to properly get into the book. I'm usually a big fan of dual timelines and jumping from one time to another, with this one I struggled a bit, especially at the beginning of the book when I still didn't know the character.

Yes like other reviewers I struggled connecting with the main character, but that's not necessarily a bad things in my eyes, sometimes you just read about different experiences from yours and you might not connect to the story or the characters, that doesn't equate non enjoying the book.

I personally preferred the chapters set in the present and quite struggled with the others, maybe mainly cause of the heaviness of the topics covered. But I overall enjoyed this book and would recommend to the right audience.

You'll never forget your first love, your childhood BFF, and the most embarrassing things that happened to you during high school. There was a lot of miscommunication and Aubrey struggles (at times, painfully) to express her feelings. Then again, awkward teenage years! The ending was a bit rushed but overall a good story. A cute YA that took me down memory lane - the good and the bad.

Elin was a hard character for me to connect to, unlike Samantha in What You Wish For by Katherine Center and Eleanor in Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, characters who’d also experienced trauma of some kind. She started out very apathetic, which was perhaps not surprising given what you learn about her, but she had no redeeming quirks, wry sense of humor, or even friends, really.

Too, the style is plain, which fits the foreboding feel of the story, but the words seem to focus on details I didn’t really care about. Even if they were a distraction for Elin, they didn’t give much insight into her as a character, although they did paint scenes pretty well.

I received a copy of the book from Netgalley to review. Thank you for the opportunity
An interesting idea behind this story and it showed promise when I picked it up. The writing is OK.
However, theC is unlikeable and difficult to understand which made the book not as engaging as I expected. The writing was wishy washy at times and the tone of the novel was quite negative.
On the whol, an OK book.

Thank you to Netgalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for the free ARC of this book in exchange of an honest review.


The cover and summary of this one piqued my interest as soon as I saw it. As I started to read the book, thought, I couldn't help but feel a bit underwhelmed, and often disappointed. The pace felt so slow for me, and I couldn't get in touch with most of Elin's motives and attitudes. It was so hard to connect with most of the characters as well. I didn't like it, overall. Just not my cup of tea.

I don’t remember anything before I was three or four. Now I have limited memories of when I was younger. Sometimes, I wonder if I just remember from looking at photographs. Could you imagine all of a sudden remembering pieces of your past? And then, not finding them to be good memories? This book was a slow start and I couldn’t relate to the story. I rated it three stars because it was still better than okay. My rating/review was given in exchange for an advance copy from NetGalley.

Told in alternating chapters between past and present, A QUESTION MARK IS HALF A HEART tells the story of a woman struggling to come to grips with a difficult childhood. In 2017, Elin is a famous photographer and former model living a privileged life. But, she has kept her impoverished Swedish roots as the daughter of abusive and distant parents a secret from everyone, even her husband and daughter. When she receives something in the mail from her childhood best friend, Fredrik, Elin is overwhelmed by memories, and the lie she is living begins to unravel.
This novel has a strong sense of place in the Sweden of Elin’s childhood. I enjoyed the sense of community in the small village, particularly, Elin’s relationships with the older women who are more of a mother to her than her own. I also appreciated the theme encapsulated in the title; that one can’t be truly loved unless they allow themselves to be fully known. All in all a good, though not exceptional read.

I admit that it took me a little while to get invested in this book, but in the end it was very worthwhile and it tugged on my heartstrings!

We first get to meet the adult Elin, a prominent photographer who has alienated her husband and daughter by putting work before family and hardly ever being present at home. Despite their twenty-or-so years of marriage, her husband Sam knows very little about Elin’s background, and her brooding silences and odd behaviour at times have driven him to the point of leaving her. Elin’s teenage daughter Alice has also moved out of the family home, and every time they meet up she ends up being frustrated by Elin’s refusal to talk about the past.

The story started to get more emotional for me as the author gradually revealed the details of Elin’s childhood which have brought her to this point in her life, and suddenly I found myself fully engaged and more sympathetic towards the adult Elin. A father in jail, an emotionally unstable mother and a terrible tragedy when Elin is a teenager will have lasting effects on her life. From here on, the book became a touching story of family secrets, guilt and finally redemption. It also showed how we can run from our past, but never escape it until we have made peace with it.

Set in small town Sweden in the 1970s and present day New York, I also felt Elin’s displacement as an immigrant, even though she has tried to put physical distance between herself and her country of birth in an effort of leaving the past behind. It was interesting to see Elin’s character develop as she slowly let her family see the darker corners of her psyche and allow her wounds to heal.

All in all, A QUESTION MARK IS HALF A HEART was part a heartbreaking coming of age story, and part a touching tale of facing up to our darkest secrets and deep-seated guilt. I really enjoyed watching Elin’s character go through stages of grief, growth and healing, and some aspects of the story broke my heart. This is a book that will appeal to readers who like slow-burning stories focused heavily on character development and the gradual unravelling of family secrets. I really enjoyed it and would love to read more from this author in future!