The Glitter Scene
A Novel
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Teenage Johanna lives with her aunt Solveig in a small house bordering the forest on the outskirts of a remote coastal town in Finland. She leads a lonely existence that is punctuated by visits to her privileged classmate, Ulla Bäckström, who lives in the nearby luxury gated community. It isn’t until Ulla tells her the local lore about the American girl and the tragedy that took place more than thirty years before that Johanna begins to question how her parents fit into the story. She sets out to unravel her family history, the identity of her mother, and the dark secrets long buried with her father. In the process of opening closed doors, others in the community reflect back on the town’s history, on their youth, and on the dreams that play in their minds. Soon a new story emerges, that stirs up Johanna’s greatest fears, but ultimately leads to the answers she is searching for. The Glitter Scene is a riveting mystery that explores the roles of truth and myth, reality and fiction, and the repercussions of family secrets.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fagerholm's dense thriller demands second reading if only to fill in the holes and put together the scattered pieces of her puzzle. In 2004, sensitive teenage Johanna lives with her aunt Solveig in a marshy seaside Finnish town still marked by the tragic events of Fagerholm's previous novel, The American Girl (a visiting girl's suspicious death, one lover's suicide, another's disillusionment). After Johanna digs into her family's connection to the tragedy, she learns the complicated history that led to the event, and the novel dips 15 years back to find Susette Packl n and Maj-Gun Maalamaa, two girls brought together by loss. They have a fraught friendship and a temporal connection to the American girl's death; this section (coyly subtitled "An entirely different story, or maybe not?") tracks the dangerous ripples that reverberate from acts of terror and love. Finally, Fagerholm returns to the original crime (and others) with an epilogue that provides some (not all) of the answers readers have been waiting for. These haunted characters reveal the effects of a tragedy on a small community. While the opaque stream-of-consciousness prose and bleak Scandinavian imagery can create inertia, the conclusion of The American Girl narrative will delight fans of the series.
