Review by Booklist Review
In northern Holland, beloved eldest son Matthies sets off ice skating where he shouldn't, and falls through the ice and drowns. His parents are shattered and bitter, convinced it is God's judgment for a long-ago abortion. Preteen Jas, her older brother Obbe, and younger sister, Hanna, must deal with Matthies' death without their parents' succor; grief envelops their dairy farm and settles in their house. Their dour, body-defying faith offers little comfort and no emotional outlet. The children turn toward each other with sexual abuse and other violent behavior. When foot-and-mouth disease invades the dairy and the cows must be destroyed, their father pulls further away. Their mother continues to starve herself into nothingness. Jas, the story's narrator, is a strange child, caught in the middle of the family's suffering, "stopped up" with constipation, but gifted with the kind of sight that takes in her family's stuntedness: they know the land but not the "things that grew inside" themselves. Rijneveld's International Booker Prize--shortlisted debut is not a novel for those expecting triumphal outcomes. Readers who can persist through the agonies of a family falling apart, however, will find their breath taken away by Rijneveld's prose as filtered through Hutchison's deft translation.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Rijneveld's head-turning debut, a bestseller in their native Netherlands and a Booker International Prize nominee, puts a contemporary spin on classic wrath-of-God literature. Narrated by Jas, the prepubescent farm daughter of Dutch Reformists (Calvinist cousins to American Evangelicalism), the novel opens with the death of Jas's oldest brother, Matthies, who drowns in an ice-skating accident. His demise unspools an already dubious family harmony. The father grows distant; the mother, emaciated and portentous, claims Matthies's death to be a sign of the 10th biblical plague. . Another plague is referenced with the spread of foot-and-mouth disease in the livestock, and Jas tortures toads into mating, convinced it will help her parents to do the same. Meanwhile, Jas and her younger sister, Hanna, make plans to run away, while their older brother, Odde, devolves into a sadistic teenager. Like a scene in a Bosch painting, the macabre material is loaded with sexual transgressions, pedophilia, animal torture, and abuse. The onslaught can be numbing, but the translation's soaring lyricism offers mercy for the reader. In another biblical plague, absolute darkness descended upon the land for three days. Here it lasts for almost 300 pages, not lifting until the final line. (Aug.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
The effects of the unspeakable grief felt by 10-year-old Jas' family after the death of her beloved older brother are explored in painful and painstaking detail in this startling debut novel by a Dutch poet. After Matthies Mulder's ice-skating venture to "the other side" of the lake in a rural farming village ends with his being trapped under the ice, the entire Mulder family unravels in ways so unsettling that death (and the allure of "the other side") beckons insidiously to those left behind. Members of a dogmatic Reformed church, the family stoically attempts to carry on life as before Matthies' death (a life cheerlessly marked by repression, guilt, the visceral horrors of dairy farming, and domination by an omniscient God). As Jas' parents slowly recede into states of icy indifference, the three surviving children create their own system of rules and survival, marked by tics, abuse, incestuous experimentation, and abject cruelty to animals (and other living creatures). Jas' narration of her family's journey into solitary madnesses alternates between poetic simplicity and childish fantasy about adult life and the world beyond farm and village. Connections between the causes and effects of life events waver between the grotesque and the mundane while Jas' ability to comprehend the world around her wavers as well. Trigger warnings may not suffice to warn unwary readers of the scatology, violence, and misogyny Jas recounts, but the larger warning should attach to the world she describes, not to her story. Rijneveld's extraordinary narrator describes a small world of pain which is hard to look at and harder to ignore. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
