The Boy in the Suitcase by Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis

This is a suspense novel, set in Denmark.  It was written by two Danish women who were already published authors in other genres, and, being friends, decided to work together to write this book.

The plot revolves around a three-year old Lithuanian boy who has been kidnapped - he's the boy in the suitcase.

Initially, one focus is on the boy's mother who was attacked by the kidnappers and who awakens in the hospital disoriented and unable to convince anyone that her child has been kidnapped.

The other thread of the narrative is on a nurse who works with abused women.  She finds the child in the suitcase, and her efforts to save this child form the other major thread of the narrative.

Eventually, we meet the couple who kidnapped the child and the two narratives merge in climax at a Danish home.

The reason for the child's kidnapping is horrific.

I liked this book because it was very well plotted and the characters, although not equally developed, did not seem flat.  It worked as a general novel as well as a suspense novel

It was easy to read and held my interest; I read it in one sitting.

5/11/14

My book group read this book and to my surprise, everyone liked it.  They really liked Nina.  And, we all agreed that the characterization was rich.  One thing several people mentioned was the fact that they kept feeling afraid for Nina and wanted to know why she just didn't go to the police?  and, what was she thinking, leaving a child in hot car?  The child could have died!  (One or two former nurses in my book group.)

I posited that Nina was feeling mistrustful of the "authorities" because of her inability to protect the Ukrainian girl who was picked up by her abuser at the Nina's workplace at the beginning of the novel. The man engaged in an sexual display that was designed to make Nina feel uncomfortable and helpless, which it did.  That was my explanation for why Nina didn't call the police.  But no one in my book group was persuaded by that explanation.

I really liked the book even more after hearing all of the others in my book group talk about how much they liked it.

The second book in the Nina Borg series is Invisible Murder; the third book in the series is Death of a Nightingale.

What I'm reading now

I have four books on my docket, and I wonder if I will get any of them read:

Sutton, by J.R. Moehringer, for a book group; Cutting for Stone, for a book group; Inferno by Dan Brown, and Five Days at Memorial:  Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital   by Sheri Fink.

For a book group, I recently read The Boy in the Suitcase, a suspense novel which I honestly enjoyed; I thought it was well-crafted.  

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce

This book was another debut novel, one that was hugely popular in Britain and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.  The author, Rachel Joyce, wrote it while her father was dying and it's easy to see how the long walk of the protagonist, who believes that it will prevent his friend from dying until he can arrive to see her, was inspired by the deals and wishes we irrationally make when our loved ones are dying.

I did not finish this book, and perhaps I would have loved it if I had.  As it was, it seemed to me a strange combination of whimsy and despair.  I simply never felt really engaged; again, I thought the mild-mannered, hen-pecked husband who rebels by doing some eccentric is a cliche and while I felt that the novel obliquely raised serious issues like grief and mental illness it didn't seem to me to say anything new or profound - nothing that would gave me that sense of immediate recognition.

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

This is a combination dystopian/coming-of-age novel.

The story is told by an adult who is recalling the year she was 11, when the earth started slowing.  That is, the days became longer until they were finally about 48 hours long and many animals and plants died.  Food production was moved into greenhouses, and the additional energy consumption of these greenhouses led to electricity shortages and rolling blackouts.

A lot of folks, including folks in the book group I read this with, really liked this novel.

I didn't like this novel.  I found the characterizations flat, or perhaps simply not original enough.

For instance, the one commenter noted that the California setting was informed by the author's own California childhood.  I didn't derive a strong sense of place from this novel.

During the first year of the slowing, the narrator falls in love and observes her mother's illness and the stress it places on her parents' marriage.

I think I felt that the novel was full of recycled elements:  I'd call it To Kill a Mockingbird meets Nevil Shute's On the Beach.

This is this author's debut novel, and I thought the prose was well written.  I understand that she wrote the novel at home in the mornings before she went to work and on the subway.  In short, it's a tremendous achievement that she was able to finish the novel.   She says that it was inspired by learning the 2004 tsunami slowed the earth's rotation by a few microseconds.  Of course, as global warming creates ever more extreme weather, it seems likely that something like that could happen again, perhaps periodically.

She says that she did not write the book about global warming and that it was not inspired by global warming, but it reminded me of the very great fear I have that we are not doing anything yet about global warming and there is no advantage to waiting.

The "age of miracles" to which the title refers is the onset of adolescence.