This is one of the most boring books I have not finished reading. In a story where past and present are so fused together that you keep asking yourself, "Wait a minute. . .is this now or then?" Until finally you realize you don't care if it's now or then. You just want it to be over. Sorry to be so negative. Maybe it's better in the original Danish. But really every chapter I read was labelled "1978" and yet in some chapters, the narrator is a young boy and in some a middle-aged man.

I kept reading because I did want to find out the answer to the puzzle of what had happened in this rural community in the 1970s. But ultimately, I wasn't that interested in reading yet another book about teenage boys and their sexual angst. The descriptions of the countryside and the farms were rich (if occasionally off putting). The physical and emotional challenges of the environment were made clear. But I didn't care enough for the story to be meaningful for me.

Basically, I felt this book was much ado about not much--one man's ego and sense of manliness maybe. I felt it was filled with gratuitous *locker room talk* and way too much chickens*** and pigs*** that added very little to nothing to the story ( except in one instance). I finished it because I expected a big denoument but it rather whimpered at the end.

Agnete Friis Made a story so lifelike that it almost scared me with its realism. With changes here and there it could have happened in real life, in my case it really happened but with no Lise. Several guys and I worked on a dairy farm haying, I learned to drive there on hay trucks, and tractors of all kinds. And the girls were there also riding horses. But I had a similar experience too that of Utzon only we had a death on a nearby hill (it was natural). It was amazing I could throw bales up 8

I’m a fan of most Scandinavian authors, but I may have found one I can do without. Honestly, do all 15 year old boys have erections every two pages? This one did. So. Many. Erections. And so many shallow characters. And a predictable yet unsatisfying conclusion. Maybe it lost something in the translation from Danish. I’ll read one more of her books before I put her in the “Life’sTooShort” column.

Down on the farm, where life revolves around the husbandry of animals if not of people, something awful happened in 1978, and the book goes back and forth between present day and then. I wasn't as put off as some readers by the downbeat tone, -- it is Scandinavia after all, and Karl Ove Knausgård has led us all over that territory via his magnum Proustean opus, even if he is in Norway and this story takes place in Denmark.

Yuck!! I really do not even have words. I’m not sure if it’s the author or the translation- but I juts found the book coarse. Like a bunch of middle school boys putting down all the dirty words they knew. Gratuitously violent and profane.

Instagram || Twitter || Facebook || Amazon || Pinterest My mother is really into Scandinavian murder mysteries, so I know a bit about them, even though it's not really my genre of choice. Agnete Friis is 1/2 of a famous writing duo behind a series of mysteries about a woman called Nina Borg, and seems like it might be the Danish answer to Miss Marple. Since then, she's gone solo, and this book, THE SUMMER OF ELLEN, is one of those singular efforts.THE SUMMER OF ELLEN is told in a dual timeli

Too much male gaze-y boner talk for me. Or maybe the amount was acceptable but it was just poorly done male gaze-y boner talk? I'll never know.

Jacob, an architect in his 50s, is having a mid life crisis. He's divorcing his wife and quoting his job. In the midst of that, he gets a call from his now elderly Great Uncle. As a 15 year old, Jacob spent a summer with his two Great Uncles. A very eventful summer, and after an explosive event, Jacob left and never went back...But after the call from his Great Uncle, Jacob returns, to find out what really happened that summer.... A good story. Told often from a boy's point of view, it is a bit

There are good reasons why Jacob has not been back to his uncle Anton's farm in the Jutland since 1978. Told in dual time line - 1978 and sort of the present- this is a dark tale of bad things that happened on that farm. Anton, now very old, wants Jacob to find out what happened to Ellen, a young hippie who was around that summer. Equally importantly, he also needs to sort out what happened to another girl. His brother Anders still lives on the farm and their relationship is, to put it briefly,

I really enjoyed this for a number of reasons. Firstly, it's beautifully written and evokes so much of the awkwardness of youth. Kudos to the translator! Secondly, (though I've never been to Denmark) it has an exquisite sense of time and place and drew memories for me (not all of them good) of being a rural teenager in summer. Thirdly, it's an interesting examination of toxic masculinity from both sides of the divide.The predictable ending feels at odds with the psychological tension Friis build...

I can understand why some readers were uncomfortable with the book and could not finish. The story begins with a man whose wife has left him and he momentarily stalks a woman , quickly reminded he is lonely, old and miserable. A great-uncle calls from a rural area, and Jacob responds. The setting recalls a summer of his childhood spent on the uncle's farm, soon after his mother left his alcoholic father. Jacob's works with the great-uncle Anton and his slower brother Anders who is not regarded a...

Like other readers the tedious misogyny bothered me,not because it offended me, but because the writer had such a bad grasp of psychology it fell flat and seemed pointless and never ending throughout the book. The rest of the book was endless descriptions of animal feces mixed with hay. Pig excrement, chicken poop, cow manure. You name the waste and it was mentioned,with limited vocabulary, constantly, for 300 pages. Lastly, the author had a real problem describing things. Sometimes she would ju...

I want to thank Edelweiss + and Soho Crime for providing me with this book in exchange for an honest reviewI'm really sorry, I don't tend to do this and less when it's an ARC, but it's not my kind of book and I can't really keep pushing myself to finish it, I don't think it's a good idea, I'm already feeling kind of slumpy so I'll leave it here and I can tell you a little about what it's about, in case you're interestedDNFMy opinion as always is 100% honest and in this case, my decision is more

Alfred Hitchcock once said that a thriller is a whodunit, an intellectual process, but suspense is an emotional one. Friis knows this — and slowly, slowly takes us by the hand and draws us into a seductive, and dangerous, summer.Full review: https://www.npr.org/2019/05/26/725827...

From the book jacket:”Agnete Friis’s evocative work of psychological suspense weaves together two periods in one man’s life to explore obsession, toxic masculinity, and the tricks we play on our own memory”A dark and depressing Danish mystery. Some very unsettling graphic violence involving chickens, dogs, farm animals. An interesting plot because it is not quite clear until the end who is actually dead. The start of the book is very slow and with the alternating chapters, one marked 1978 and t

I thought about this book quite differently. It wasn’t trashy, just a fluffy read. It had almost nothing in it that I enjoyed and the best thing looking forward to this book was getting to see the actions of the characters in the past in some chapters. The only reason I’m shelving this as Literary-Fiction is because I honestly think it reads like one. Most mysteries don’t have this kind of lack luster of words that dulls you into not believing the story. For the most part, the book being too lon...

What a bizarre book. I'm not sure that I ever grasped or understood the story the author was actually trying to tell, and the book made me cringe far too frequently. Many parts of the book were uncomfortable but necessary; just as many felt completely unnecessary and borderline voyeuristic. Ellen, the titular character, has very little impact, and the main character never had clear motivations. It was a decent book, but not one that left a lasting impression.

I wanted to read about Denmark where I lived decades ago. This is a very different environment than the one I knew. A commune, hog farm, chicken farm and lots of heat. I got to know a lot of characters, many not especially likeable, but interesting and with many secrets. The switching in time frames sometimes confused me, but the author got me on track fairly quickly. The details of place were intense, as was the tension within the I character. This was an intense reading experience.