Review: Jag väntar under mossan

Jag väntar under mossan by Amanda Hellberg
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book has so much going for it, and then it just ... doesn't deliver. I loooove me some Swedish folklore, and I don't know what time of the year could be better to read a scary book about the Swedish summer than during the Swedish summer, but ... no. It's kinda scary, I'll give it that, I think that is one of the book's few strenghts, that and the mythology/folklore stuff.

The rest? Naah. I absolutely ABHOR books that have more than one POV, and this one manages to have them ALL, first, second and third person. I mean, FINE, I guess I can handle first and second if done well, but don't fucking mix first and third. Don't. Do. It. I've read very very VERY few books that worked with that.

The book also feels incredibly rushed? I get that it's for "a younger audience" (this means nothing for me, but apparently it's meant for ages 12-15 which I guess is the awkward stage between child and young adult, so I've tagged it as both), but I've read some children's fantasy books that are fucking AMAZING and well-written and well-paced, so I'm not going to excuse it on that account. The same goes for the subtley, which is non-existent, and you can pretty much guess the entire plot from the first few chapters. Literally nothing happens that doesn't magically tie into the plot just perfectly a page or so later.

This is the second book I'm reading from this author, and I wasn't really impressed by either of them, to be honest. I don't like her writing style and I don't like this hard-on for the UK she has, and it's just not my thing. But even worse than that, it violated one of my fave things about fantasy books for younger people, because it included RAPE as a plot point and NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO that's not fucking okay. It wasn't graphic or even described, but it was THERE and it was very important for what happened so I fucking hated that. Fuck.

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True story.