A Nearly Normal Family by M.T.Edvardsson
Published June 2019: first US edition; originally published in Sweden 2018
Celadon Books/ Macmillan Publishers
ISBN: 9781250204431
389 pages
$26.99
Ever listen to people recount stories from their experiences? The story is ever-changing, and the story is never the same between people. This is why, when conducting interrogations, the police question everyone that they can. As more and more stories are told, more information is released to complete what happened. A Nearly Normal Family embodies this idea. Told in three parts about a crime surrounding a family, even at the end of the story I had no idea who committed the crime.
Every family, even if you don’t believe it, will do anything to keep the members of their family safe. A Nearly Normal Family shows this as the father, a pastor, forgets his ethics, the mother, a lawyer, toes the line of the law, and the daughter, faced with being charged for murder, refuses to say anything to prevent the public from seeing twisted images of her loved ones. Here friends are just as valuable as blood, but as the tension on what happened closes in, all relationships are tested.
Completely relatable, each character has faults that they are blind to. They are blindsided by the situation that they are facing and each blame themselves. While, thankfully, I have never been in a position like the family in the novel, the idea of family sticking together comes out in most crime television shows and movies.
These two aspects of the novel were what really held me to reading the novel. I wanted to see if I could figure out who was the murderer and the constant changing of stories just fed me a few small facts at a time. The characters also really drove the story. It was interesting seeing the characters act towards their faults even as they are blind to them. I really wouldn’t change anything about the novel. I even liked how the ending stopped abruptly in the epilogue in the flashback to the act of the crime as it never states who exactly is the murderer.
My favorite character had to be the daughter though. With what her situation was, I believe that she was extremely well-written. She was mature with no impulse control, and smart with no filter. Her background seemed complete and all her acts worked well with how her character was presented.
This is not M.T. Edvardsson’s first book. He has written multiple novels for both adults and teens. The only major problem I have with this book is that he doesn’t use commas properly. Of course, the editor should have corrected this, but given the fact that the story was translated to English, there is a probability that punctuation was forgotten about.
Editor: 3/5
Plot: 10/10
Relatability: 5/5
Recommend: 18/20
Score: 90%
Rosey Reviews 