The first couple of pages of Christina Sunley’s debut novel, The Tricking of Freya, seem a little awkward. But once it becomes clear that the narrator is writing a letter to an unknown cousin, her Aunt Birdie's child. When things fall into place, the book takes off and powers along right up to the last page.
In her never-finished letter to the cousin she hopes to find, the troubled heroine examines her family’s tribulations as well as her own, following family history from Iceland, to Canada, and back. Sunley does not flinch when writing about mental illness and how people react to it, which makes her book sometimes difficult, but more rewarding that the typical coming-of-age novel.
This is a complex story, well told and thoroughly entertaining.
NOTE
This book was on my LibraryThing Early Reviewer list. One more scratched off.OTHER REVIEWS
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