Blurb

Ida is a forty-year-old architect, single and struggling with the feeling of panic as she realises her chances of motherhood are rapidly falling away from her. She’s navigating Tinder and contemplating freezing her eggs – but tries to put a pause on these worries as she heads out to the family country cabin for her mother’s 65th birthday. That is, until some supposedly wonderful news from her sister sets old tensions simmering, building to an almighty clash between Ida and her sister, her mother, and her entire family. Exhilarating, funny, and unexpectedly devastating, Grown Ups gets up close and personal with a dysfunctional modern family.

Review

I’m a big fan of translated fiction, but I haven’t read much Norwegian fiction at all, except for Vidgis Hjorth’s excellent book Long Live the Post Horn! – so I was intrigued by Grown Ups and delighted to be offered a spot on the blog tour. Many thanks to Tara at Pushkin Press for providing me with a proof copy in exchange for an honest review.

This is a slim book, but it packs a real punch. It is both funny and really unnerving, so close to the bone that it feels dangerously exposing. I have rarely read a book in which the family dynamics at play feel quite so hostile and tense without it tipping over into a full-blown thriller. The relationship between Ida and her sister is frequently uncomfortable to read, but it is horribly accurate on the way we needle those close to us, pressing the most sensitive nerves because we have intimate knowledge of where they are. The knowledge that a family member carries, especially a sibling, is a potential incendiary device: all that history simmers just under the surface. It’s horrifyingly and fascinatingly realistic to watch the sisters poking each other with their sharpened words.

Ida is a hypnotic protagonist. She’s not likeable, which is refreshing (I’ve talked before about how we need more unlikeable female protagonists!) but it is possible to sympathise with her situation as she wrestles with the ticking of her damn biological clock, and the sense of time passing her by before she has really worked out what she wants from life. She is a really interesting mix of cynicism and naivety – she veers from childish behaviour to trying to keep everything together, and I found my feelings towards her changed moment to moment. Sometimes I just wanted to shake her and tell her to behave – other times I was completely on her side. When your emotions are so highly activated by a character, you know the book is a good one!

This is a brave, sometimes shocking novel, which ramps up the tension in subtle ways until by the end you really do feel that anything could happen. The vivid present tense and the careful descriptions of the family meals and evening drinking sessions at the cabin create an immersive reading experience, and I finished the book feeling as if I had been more than just an observer of this incredibly complicated family holiday. Intelligent, angry, uncomfortable and at times almost unbearably tense, this is a brilliant book that I highly recommend, and I look forward to reading more of the author’s work.

Grown Ups by Marie Aubert translated by Rosie Hedger is published by Pushkin Press and is available to purchase here.

Even before discovering Book Twitter and the world of Book Blogging, I would usually set myself a TBR and stick to it, working my way through a list of books more or less in the order I’d written them down, sometimes months before. I’ve had yearly TBRs before that I have hardly deviated from.

But now, the way I read is changing. Now, more and more, I find that setting myself a list of books to read makes me chafe against the restriction, artificial and self-created as it is. Part of it is petty rebellion, wanting to be a bit ‘naughty’ and not follow the rules (sadly this is about as rebellious as I get these days!) but there is also something else going on.

I am becoming, slowly but surely, much more of a mood reader. Having studied literature at university, I got used to having set book lists and plodding my way through them methodically, and I guess I got stuck in that habit for a long time. I used to finish every book I started, dutifully, even if I wasn’t enjoying it. These days, I am much more likely to put a book down and pick up something else if it isn’t doing it for me. Sometimes it’s just a case of the wrong time, and I can come back to it later and enjoy it more. Sometimes the book just isn’t for me – and I’m learning to be okay with that.

There is, of course, the issue of books that NEED reading by a certain time – blog tour books, ARCs kindly provided by lovely publishers and publicists, author requests that make me feel very guilty if I leave them for months (it does happen, and I do apologise – I WILL get to them!). I have had to cut down on blog tours in order to accommodate my changing reading habits – I will always try and meet my commitments, I just need fewer of them at the moment.

What it boils down to is that I don’t want to feel obligated to read a book – I want to really, really fancy reading it. I think I’m having a sort of reaction against being so prescriptive with my reading for so long, and I reckon it will balance out again soon, so I will keep my hand in with the tours and so on, but for now, I am also going to let myself enjoy this new, freer way of reading.

I’d love to know your thoughts on this – do you set yourself a monthly TBR? Or are you a mood reader? If you take part in tours and read advanced copies, how do you stop it from feeling prescriptive and keep the sense of the fun of reading alive?