THE SECRET OF SNOW, cozy, sentimental Swedishness

THE SECRET OF SNOW
TINA HARNESK (tr. Alice Menzies)
Atria Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: This lyrical runaway Swedish hit follows a reclusive, elderly couple who cross paths with a pair of twentysomething newcomers in a small mountain town, revealing an unexpected, shared history and the reclamation of a nearly extinct culture.

Meet Máriddja: eccentric, eighty-five years old, and facing a cancer diagnosis. She’s determined to keep the truth about her illness from her husband Biera, while also finding someone who can take care of him once she’s gone.

Meet Kaj: a new transplant to the village, recently engaged to Mimmi, and mourning the death of his mother. One day, when Kaj unexpectedly finds a box of Sámi—the indigenous people of Scandinavia—handicrafts belonging to his mother, he unlocks something he never anticipated, something that will change his life for years to come.

A “brilliant debut” (Aftonbladet Söndag, Sweden) full of humor and heartbreak, The Secrets of Snow movingly grapples with grief, love, and the power of history.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: As with most bestsellers, this story is pitched right down the middle. Take one old (straight, natch) couple facing end of life issues of varying but intense urgency. Add one young (straight, natch) couple facing relationship teething pains and life traumas. Connect them by geography in a place small enough to breed affinity through enforced proximity. Add a glaze of native cultural issues. Give the old woman an iPhone and have her repurpose Siri as a confidant for comic relief. Serve.

It's fine if this is dessert after a hearty substantial meal. This is presented as the meal. If these were the concluding chapters of a much longer book that dug into Kaj's relationship with his mother and dialed down the awkward obvious coincidence that's telegraphed early and often, and the roots of Mári's anguished love for Biera (though who wouldn't be mad for someone who thinks his wife "was generous with everything, including her dignity" when everyone else thinks she's a madwoman!), I'd be wadding up the Kleenex with the rest of y'all.

It's a debut novel, and as I've said many times I grade on a curve for debut novelists, or I'd be a lot less tactful in expressing my dissatisfaction. I now turn your attention to the marvelous, evocative writing. Particularly effective, probably even moreso in Swedish, is the evocation of Sámi culture...the indigenous folk of the Arctic are about as well-presented in Sweden as First Nations people are in Canada, and only Black people are presented worse than Native Americans in the US. Author Harnesk does not stint on her vocabulary. Menzies, our translator, has worked hard and successfully to render the tone of the original. I don't speak Swedish, but there's a feel, an aura around a really well-made work of prose that comes through in the very best translations. It came through here.

While understanding why this became a bestseller does not add to my desire to praise it, I predict all y'all would love the read if you gave it a try. The Fredrik Backman bus, the Shelby van Pelt posse, the Sally Hepworth squad, should bypass the library hold list and put your credit cards on the line. This book is aimed right at you. Any reader wanting a lingering look at love, grief, and a lifetime of being true to your lights finally being rewarded should get it from the library. Request it if you don't see it in the catalog.

It's built to make you feel the warm glow of goodness.

DAYS AT THE MORISAKI BOOKSHOP, charming bestseller set in a bookshop

DAYS AT THE MORISAKI BOOKSHOP
SATOSHI YAGISAWA (tr. Eric Ozawa)
Harper Perennial
$16.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: a generous 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The moving international sensation about new beginnings, human connection, and the joy of reading.

Hidden in Jimbocho, Tokyo, is a booklover's paradise. On a quiet corner in an old wooden building lies a shop filled with hundreds of second-hand books.

Twenty-five-year-old Takako has never liked reading, although the Morisaki bookshop has been in her family for three generations. It is the pride and joy of her uncle Satoru, who has devoted his life to the bookshop since his wife Momoko left him five years earlier.

When Takako's boyfriend reveals he's marrying someone else, she reluctantly accepts her eccentric uncle's offer to live rent-free in the tiny room above the shop. Hoping to nurse her broken heart in peace, Takako is surprised to encounter new worlds within the stacks of books lining the Morisaki bookshop.

As summer fades to autumn, Satoru and Takako discover they have more in common than they first thought. The Morisaki bookshop has something to teach them both about life, love, and the healing power of books.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A book about books, and a bookshop, and the gentle art of connecting to others in the broken places life inflicts on us? A non-reader learning the power of books, and stories, to help and heal and bring us together? Sign me up!

You get all of that in this internationally bestselling novel. It is exactly correctly marketed, and aimed directly at the book-gollum that lurks in your #Booksgiving circle...the mid-teens niece who gobbles the usual suspects of YA fiction, the later tween granddaughter who needs a fresh subject to care passionately about. The reader who is also a bookaholic is likely to get less from it than a newer reader, as this is largely well-traveled territory for most of us over a certain age; still enjoyable, certainly, and so short that it's a long sitting of reading.

I've just been here before quite often. Moods and atmosphere make for fun experiences of reading and Jimbocho, in a few deft strokes feels real. Why then am I recommending it for your teen bookeaters? It's...fine. It's not more than fine, but it's solidly...fine. I reserve phrases like "good enough" to damn with faint praise. This is..fine. Sitting around with one's less than riveting relatives of a Yuletide eve, this is the best kind of read to have, and so to give to someone who's in that situation.

Coping with heartbreak is always going to appeal to younger audiences. They experience so much of it. The nature of Takako's dumping by her pretty rotten boyfriend is going to appeal; the nature of Satoru and Motoko's estrangement will certainly raise a lot of tissues.

Finding Family within one's family is a rare and wonderful experience. I think the story is a hit around the world for a very clear reason. Get it into the right hands and it will make the Yuletide bright, shiny, and bearable.

More Motherhood Propaganda: THE HEN WHO DREAMED SHE COULD FLY. Buy it for the illos.

THE HEN WHO DREAMED SHE COULD FLY
SUN-MI HWANG translated by Kim Chi-Young, illustrated by Nomoco
Penguin Books
$15.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: This is the story of a hen named Sprout. No longer content to lay eggs on command, only to have them carted off to the market, she glimpses her future every morning through the barn doors, where the other animals roam free, and comes up with a plan to escape into the wild—and to hatch an egg of her own.

An anthem for freedom, individuality and motherhood featuring a plucky, spirited heroine who rebels against the tradition-bound world of the barnyard, The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly is a novel of universal resonance that also opens a window on Korea, where it has captivated millions of readers. And with its array of animal characters—the hen, the duck, the rooster, the dog, the weasel—it calls to mind such classics in English as Animal Farm and Charlotte’s Web.

Featuring specially-commissioned illustrations, this first English-language edition of Sun-mi Hwang’s fable for our times beautifully captures the journey of an unforgettable character in world literature.

My Review: Jonathan Livingston Seagull meets Babe. To compare the book to Charlotte's Web is damned near heresy. In every generation, there's another fable of Independence Declared by ____ and the Struggles of _____ to xxxx. This is the 21st century's international publishing phenomenon in the genre, which the provincial, smugly self-satisfied Murrikin Megapublishers got 15 years after most places did.

If you're 14 and a sad, lonely, misunderstood girl, this is ideal to stuff into your locker. Also a grandmother's ideal gift for same. Older folks who've just become grandparents, adoptees and their mommies, those who are sentimental as all get-out, queue up for your copy.

The illustrations are so very spare and lovely and evocative that I gave the silly text 3 stars. But my serious objection to the book is that the hen's one true dream, the longing of her soul, the reason she's ready to fight a weasel fagodsake is:

She want to become a real hen and hatch an egg.

So, in other words, Motherhood Makes the Hen.

This is not a message I think needs further spreading. It has metastasized in our various cultures to the point that rich first-world folks go buy themselves a baby girl at the Chinese Baby Bazaar, or spend absurd amounts of money doing medical hoo-hah and get themselves their very own genetic descendants.

With seven billion people on the planet, this obsession, this personal value marker, needs to be re-thought and revised.