I’ve finally decided to start working through all the books I’ve bought myself over the years that have been sitting on me shelf untouched. This novel by M.T. Edvardsson, like most of my other purchases, have been bargain bin finds, with blurbs intriguing enough for me to purchase. A Nearly Normal Family fit that mold, with its unsettling mystery at the center.
Broken into three parts, we first start with a pastor in Sweden, Adam, who flashes between present day and certain points in the past involving his now eighteen year old daughter who’s the prime suspect in the murder of a man almost twice her age. He paints Stella out to be a normal girl, with athletic prowess, incredible smarts, and a bright future. It’s in the flashbacks that we learn that Stella isn’t quite the perfect child he’d like to believe she is. Plenty of the bad things in her life are of her own making, but the biggest transgression he witnesses is at a bible camp where she is found by Adam hooking up with a new worker at Adam’s church. In light of these allegations against Stella, Adam wants to believe his daughter is innocent, but there are so many things that leave him filled with doubt.
Stella’s bit of the story sees her flash between her past and her current place in jail awaiting trial. She recounts similar events in her life to her father, though we are now getting her perspective. Most things in life can’t keep her attention and don’t excite her, though she has no idea what she wants to do with the rest of her life. The incident at the camp is rape, plain and simple, but she’s told again and again that reporting it would do her no good. It’s when she comes into contact with Chris, the dead man, that things start to become more interesting again for Stella. With all of that though, I was really taken with her love for her best friend. Stella herself seems like an unlikely friend anyone would be smart enough to hold onto.
Admittedly, by the time I got to the mother’s part, defense attorney, Ulrika, I didn’t really understand why she would be last in this story. Up until this point, from both Adam and Stella’s perspective, she hasn’t been that heavily invested in the case and doesn’t seem to have been as strong of a presence in the past other than working a lot. It turns out that Ulrika is really, really good at keeping secrets and being very discreet. These skills payoff bigtime in the end. She really is the glue that binds these different perspectives together.
When I started this rather long novel, I thought it was going to take me a while to get through, but I was hooked just enough that I breezed through it. I probably also helped myself by not spoiling the ending as I do fairly often. I will say that Adam’s part was the toughest to get through, and while he moved the story along, he felt to me as the one missing most of the pieces of his family’s life. Though I was overall satisfied with the book, I did come to guess the ending about halfway through. Still, worth checking out if you were a fan of Defending Jacob. Both have you pondering what a parent would do for their child.