The Undesired

Happy New Year, everyone! It has been a long three weeks, and working retail life does not help with the matter. I hope you were all able to spend time with loved ones, and give and receive many blessings. With the new year come new reviews. I thank you all for the support and follows, and I will keep trucking along with old and new books, good and bad, I guess whatever my bookcases have stored in them.

I have something different to start off the year. Coming from Iceland, The Undesired is more of the horror end of mystery. Ódinn is a newly widowed divorcee with a young daughter named Rún who is trying to figure out how to move forward from the ex-wife/mother’s death. He works for the city, investigating cases of abuse of children while they were in detention centers and foster care; when a co-worker passes away, Ódinn is given the case she was working on: a couple of boys died while at a detention center in the 70s and the facility needs to be investigated so that the state can compensate those that lived there. That is story one; story two is about Aldis, a young cleaning lady for a detention center where she has to put up the awful couple that runs the facility and the boys who do nothing but be disrespectful. She gets caught up with the new-comer who seems different from the others, leading to concerning drama.

Just to state the obvious, the two stories intertwine with each other; somehow they are connected, but the reader has to figure out how and why. I was struck first by the writing and how different it is from other mysteries I have read; it was a fresh style of writing. To me, I would read other books by Yrsa Sigurdardottir just based off of that. She made me work for the solution. Maybe I am rusty in my detective skills compared to others; who knows? I liked the storyline, and the situations regarding the characters with the root being deep seeded family issues. Aldis’s relationship with her mother, Odinn and Lára (ex wife), Rún and her parents, etc all have a varying range of conflict and what we see as the reader is the impact that it makes on everyone around them whether they are aware of it or not. It sucks that there are mostly negative repercussions, but it only pushes the story along for us.

I liked that it was shorter; it was to the point, where nothing held the book back. Lately I have noticed that when it comes to certain books that I get annoyed by having a book be held back by its own filling. I liked that there was no struggling through it; once I started reading I could not stop.

I enjoyed reading The Undesired; I would like to find other books by Yrsa Sigurdardottir because, again, it was a good read that kept my attention. I would say that because it deals with some heavy topics, I would leave the decision to read The Undesired at a little level of discretion, but with everything else that people are watching or reading, who am I to say… If you would like to check out The Undesired, you would be able to find it here.

9/10