This was a very intense book.
Though id say its not for me, i could definitely see the appeal. Almost claustrophobic feeling, the writing is good, but unsettling.

I loved the opening- a girl with a strong voice, a family tenderly described in all their eccentricities and then an appalling event. The author writes so well and vividly of the confusion of children and the horrible undermining part that guilt plays in our lives.
However although her writing never dips in verve or style, the story gets stuck and the novel is caught in a vortex around this one act, seemingly unable, like its characters, to move on.
That said I will definitely search out Rigneveld’s next works as she is clearly a major talent with a totally unique and beautiful voice.

Reading this story is not an experience I would care to repeat. It follows the destruction of a young family after the eldest son is killed in a skating accident. The remaining three children are particularly affected as their parents cannot articulate their grief and become incapable of looking after them, especially when their cattle farm is struck by foot and mouth disease. The children resort to harming themselves, each other and farmyard animals - horrible stuff that is guaranteed to have me flicking over pages as quickly as possible. I can understand what the author is trying to show about grief and how it should be handled, but the telling of it was too much for me.

I can’t fault the writing or translation so two stars for that alone.

This book was incredibly good and incredibly uncomfortable. Every chapter felt slightly more horrifying. I just felt so much pain and so much pity for the narrator, Jas - when things at home get harder and harder after her brother's death. It deals with anxiety, grief, guilt, and what happens when these are not addressed. The themes reminded me of Annie Ernaux; the writing was gorgeous, impactful and poetic. The translation was good enough that it did not feel like a translation. It's a book you keep thinking of for days after finishing it.

Rijneveld's prose creates an increasing feeling of discomfort; the writing style is definitely its own character, ruthless and completely authentic, presents the story through beautiful sentences and unsettling imagery.

I guess as expressions of grief go, this one was incredibly unexpected. As much as I wanted to appreciate the frank observations of an adolescent, which I did think were handled well by the author, I just felt a little fatigued as the book wore on. Maybe I am not the target audience for this, I'm sure others will appreciate it more.

This is a darkdark book. Although there is something reassuringly Lindgren-esque about Rijneveld’s writing style, it is starkly contrasted by the content.
Written in a stream-of-conciousness style, Rijneveld tells the story of Jas Mulder, a 12-year old girl growing up on a dairy farm with her Dutch Reformist parents and her siblings at the time of the foot-and-mouth outbreak. Her elder brother Matthies has just drowned whilst ice-skating on a lake.
Jas is a peculiar child full of acute observations from a child’s perspective:
“It’s confusing, but grown-ups are often confusing because their heads work like a Tetris game and they have to arrange all their worries in the right place. When there are too many of them, they pile up and everything gets stuck. Game over.”
Jas is a child that grows up being brainwashed by Reformist dogma, but still manages to think big thoughts. She and her siblings are desperately trying to make sense of the senseless and are as powerless as their parents, struggling in parallel universes. Her personal loss, the loss of her family’s livelihood, Jas’s grief will ultimately be her undoing.

It was a difficult read for me. Someone else mentioned maybe it's the translation, but I can assure you it's not. I speak Dutch and tried to translate it into Dutch in my head, but it was still a very difficult read. Almost every paragraph started off with whatever happened at that moment and then ended with some sombre metaphors. It was relentless. It was a constant wave of darkness and discomfort, there was no room in the story where one can catch one's breath. I was a bit confused about which year this story took place, because I thought Google and Pokemon became popular in Europe way after discman and dial-up modem were out of fashion.

This was a challenging read but I’m glad I kept pushing through. Written in first person from the perspective of Jas, a Dutch 12 year old living on her parents’ farm, the lens of childhood makes the terrible things that happen to her family all the more horrible. I was uncomfortable, I was disgusted, but I got something out of reading it.

This is an extremely unsettling book narrated by the young daughter of a dairy farmer, Jas. At the beginning of the book her brother dies in a skating accident and we see through her eyes how she and the rest of her family deal with the loss. Jas has a wild imagination and she performs strange erotic rituals with her siblings, tortures and kills animals and continually fantasizes about leaving the farm for 'the other side'. This is a disturbing but very powerfully written debut novel.

I'm not sure how much my mixed reaction to this book was due to the translation and how much was due to the author's style. I've generally loved all Scandinavian imports I've read so far, whether it be mystery or literary fiction or fantasy. It is such a rare treat to find another book that has made the translation into English. Here, though, I found the writing, the overabundance of similes and metaphors, not to my taste. Some of them read awkwardly (again, may be the translation) and in these parts I found myself growing quickly detached from Jas's story.

I did love the pastoral feel of the novel. It had something of a European classic feel about it, which I personally love. And the characters were vividly-drawn. My only real issue was the language-- the purple prose and the feeling that every single action or description was overwritten. It made it a bit of a chore to push through to the end.

I didnt finish this book I'm afraid ,though I got a good way through it.
I'm not really sure what to say about it. I never settled into the story or felt anything for the characters.