Review by Booklist Review
Something's keeping Iðunn up at night. Although her name references the goddess of youth, she's feeling older than ever--waking to extreme fatigue, unexplained residue on her hands, and a marine scent in her bed. Iðunn loses hope as her new, young doctor can't find anything wrong, but her new smartwatch records thousands of steps overnight, and even sleeping pills do nothing for her. Other distractions abound, and the disappearance of her neighborhood's beloved cats, a married ex who can't take no for an answer, and a handsome new lover who knew her dead sister serve to complicate Iðunn's waking hours. Knútsdóttir breaks Iðunn's story into bite-size chapters, like the flashes of a waking nightmare, mounting dread as the pages slowly lose their ink. Knútsdóttir's artful spiral of terror doubles as an examination of the modern condition, where Iðunn's disconnect from others builds to an uncontrollable and inevitable denouement. This Icelandic import will have fans of Ling Ma, Paula Hawkins, and other flawed female narrators demanding more translations of Knútsdóttir's work.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Knútsdóttir's surreal and spectacular English-language debut, crisply translated by multiple Hugo award winner Kowal, finds protagonist Iðunn suffering from chronic exhaustion that the medical establishment has, through a combination of neglect and incompetence, failed to treat, leading her to use a number of ersatz self-care solutions. When she wears a step-counting watch to bed one night, she wakes up achy, smelling of the nearby ocean, and having apparently walked more than 40,000 steps in her sleep. As her personal life and relationships crumble due to depression and fatigue, her mysterious nocturnal activities leave her with bizarre wounds. At her wit's end, Iðunn sets up her phone in the corner of the room to record what she does after she goes to sleep--and what she discovers sets off a horrifying chain of events that threatens every aspect of her waking life. Knútsdóttir's parenthetical asides and idiosyncratic voice create a queasy sense of vertigo as the story unfolds, and the time the narrative takes to reveal its secrets is well spent on the way to a conclusion at once grotesque and beautiful. This is psychological horror at its finest. (Jan.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
IÐunn, a young professional in Iceland, has no trouble falling asleep, but she keeps waking up exhausted. After accidentally leaving her smartwatch on all night, she wakes up and sees that she has walked thousands of steps overnight. Told solely from IÐunn's perspective as she quickly spirals, this novel conveys her horror as she tries to stop herself from sleepwalking, figures out she is doing horrible things in her sleep, both to herself and others, and then starts to realize why and who is behind it all. The gripping tension of the plot is underscored by the physical layout of the book; multiple pages contain only one desperate line of text, followed by an extra blank page, allowing readers to physically feel the tension as they feverishly flip the pages. But readers beware, cats are harmed in this story. VERDICT Knútsdóttir will hook readers with her first title to be translated into English. For fans of disorienting psychological horror marked by extreme tension and familial trauma, such as in The Grip of It by Jac Jemc, My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite, and anything by Catriona Ward.
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