Quicksand

What a brilliant book!! I was totally gripped from first page to last. This amazing read made me laugh, cry and nod along with so many lines. A book that makes you question whilst being totally entertained by brilliant writing. I would highly recommend this book.

After reading the description of Quicksand, I set out convinced how the book would read and play out and thankfully, I was oh so wrong on every account. What an incredibly compelling book! Unable to put it down, author Malin Persson Giolito lays out the present situation interspersed with 18 year old Maja's memories and insights characterizing her perception of events leading up to the present giving the reader just enough to instill confidence of knowing what's going on. Wrong! Every few pages entices with more unexpected twists and surprises keeping the reader hooked until the satisfying end. The characters were intriguing so I'm hoping there is a sequel. Kudos to Ms. Malin Persson Giolito, well done!

To say I loved this book would be an understatement! It was compelling; Maja, the eighteen-year old narrator drew me in from the first page and held me captive until the last. We know from the outset that she admitted to killing her best friend and her boyfriend in a high school shooting; what we don't know is why. After having taught at a high school that had a shooting a few years after I transferred to another, I know the trauma that lingers for years after questions are left unanswered about the shooters and their motives. So this was an incredibly believable story with such great pacing and characters that we both love and detest for their vulnerable qualities but often careless and thoughtless actions. It is a story about family, friendships, jealousy, obsessive love, and secrets that can wound and destroy. It will resonate with me for long after i finished.

This novel, Quicksand by Malin Persson Giolito, continues the trend of shocking and highly readable Swedish novels translated into English, readied to be a sensation stateside. The first chapter catapults the reader directly into the story, throwing you off balance and it takes the rest of the novel to feel like you are back on solid ground.

Without giving too much away, the story at the surface is about a school shooting. When I realized this, I was of course a bit shocked but also worried it would be a morality tale, or something has already (very depressingly) been well trodden. This is not the case at all, and is actually about so much more. Told from the perspective of a girl who survived the shooting, and is also accused of murder, the story takes huge twists and turns, reaching into the past and moving quickly through a trial. I loved how well Giolito was able to reveal huge nuggets of information throughout the story, keeping you surprised until the end. They are often so subtle you may think wait, did I already know this? Or is this new information? I can imagine it must be hard to have a first person narrative as the voice of a novel, who knows the whole story, but is only telling the reader just what they need to know about the truth to keep it interesting and surprising.

The English translation of Quicksand comes out in March of next year and I wouldn’t be surprised if it is a hugely talked about book, and for all the right reasons.

I loved this book! I could stop right there, because there are no words to truly describe this compelling story. Quicksand, by Malin Persson Giolito, pulls you into Maja’s story from the opening page and never lets go. What is her role in the school shooting? Though she is unharmed and finds herself on trial, will she always remain a victim in some manner? There are many twists and turns to this story without becoming tedious, but rather, kept me reading long after I should have been asleep. The characters are fleshed out just enough to feel that you know them without sacrificing the essence that is Maja. Her story is about relationships with family and friends, money and power, love and deceit, a story that captivated me until the last line.

“No one asked if I wanted to save Sebastian, but you all blame me for failing…”

I was truly excited to read and review this novel, Quicksand, by Swedish author Malin Persson Giolito. I first heard about it when it was just a deal to be translated—just another deal that happens every week in the publishing world. Yet, already I was intrigued by the premise and kept an eye out for it. So, you can imagine that when it happened across my path as an advance-read copy, wrapped in an unobtrusive (and probably at the time, incomplete) front cover, I leapt at it.

Maja Norberg is an eighteen-year-old last-year student at an expensive prep school in the center of a wealthy Swedish suburb. When she meets Sebastian, the son of billionaire Claes Fagerman, she’s immediately swept up in the ultra-cool image he’s always exuded, the weeks spent on his father’s luxurious boats and in all of the perks and toys, drugs and sex, emotional angst and obsession that their relationship evolves into. During this last year in school, the unthinkable happens, and Maja is left holding the smoking gun, literally, tearing her away from her comfy existence in the ‘burbs and placing her right in the middle of the media sensation court case of the century.

This novel started slowly, and in a tone that irritated me at first. Rather, Maja irritated me at first. But I pressed on, and I was very soon rewarded for it. For, all of the pieces of this narrative (this novel is told in interchanging sections) that seemed scattered at first, all moved together to complete the picture as a whole at a brilliant pace, pulling me in with it. This was a superb modern-day characterization of rich teens. Not a single character came off as a caricature or stereotype; they all filled the page, as if they were real people—flaws and all. Imagine Steig Larsson meets The Most Dangerous Place on Earth, and you’ve got a great idea of the sharp insight and cunningly skilled writing that you’re in for here, for this novel was everything that Dangerous Place was trying to be.

One of my favorite goodie takeaways from this novel was those thoughtful yet significant nuggets of truth and awareness here, which I so welcomed and respected. I love a sharp narrator, one who can pick apart the people around them. And that’s who Giolito gave her reader in Maja Norberg. Because, what you’ll be pleasantly surprised to find within these pages is that Quicksand features class tensions, the privilege of wealth and what happens when those taut lines cross one time too many.

“…you are wrong if you think a good story isn’t necessary. All you have to do is watch Idol or X Factor…to understand that the backstory is half the point. You all want to be surprised when the fatty sings like a star, you want to feel gratified when he made it ‘despite the odds,’ and you want to believe that it’s just bad luck that my parents don’t also live in Djursholm and work as doctors and lawyers, that it’s an injustice you are definitely not complicit in, but you can say it’s wrong and feel bad that we don’t take better care of our immigrants, if they would only be a little more Swedish, learn their new language faster, study a little harder, then the American dream would be just within reach. You love the American dream…”

In Quicksand, Malin Persson Giolito not only weaves an incredibly incisive and pulsating story, but she also manages to tackle serious social and economic issues with stunning clarity that made me sit up and re-read her passages. And, her socioeconomic commentary was presented in all of the best ways, so integrated into the actual story line that the latter would have seemed incomplete without the former, so dramatically illustrated by the sharp angles and trajectories at which these teenage lives crossed that it becomes a major undertone of the novel—a foundation of the plot rather than an accessory. Lines like, “Our problem isn’t immigrants, it’s this one percent with too much money,” cut deeply within the narrative and provoke thought all the more, because their brilliant placement within the narrative makes the reader feel that they’ve stumbled across a rare, half-hidden jewel, so that they long to find and pick up another.

I became so fully engrossed in Maja’s story, that I, too, gasped at turns of events in the courtroom and I, too, along with the judge and jury, weighed the evidence against her, trying to decide if I felt that she was guilty or not. Giolito was very skilled with the way that she handled this novel, because all parts of it—the courtroom, the jail/solitary confinement, and the backstory leading up to it—were all truly gripping, once the novel fully took off. Even the small annoyances at the beginning came together and re-presented themselves in a new light in the end, which I could only stand back and appreciate.

Giolito made me question my own instincts as to whether Maja was guilty or innocent, and I loved every minute of it. I was compelled to turn each and every page, to live these characters’ lives out with them until the very end, and for that I award the rarely given and always coveted 5 stars. *****

An amazing book that hooked me and DEMANDED my attention from the beginning. As in, don't answer the phone, check Twitter, etc because the story is that interesting. The coming of age/society expectations were spot on and I couldn't put it down. Very well done!!