A Mysterious Review of …
Norwegian by Night by Derek B. Miller.
Review summary: This is most certainly not a mainstream crime thriller. Setting aside the murder of a woman and the arguably illegal abduction of her son by the central character, crime is not the central issue here. And the book is not much of a thriller. To be sure, it's nearly impossible to classify this book. Which to some readers will be its great appeal, a cross-genre, whimsically quirky, novel; to others, it is merely an incoherent mess. (Click here for text of full review.)
Our rating:
Norwegian by Night
Derek B. Miller
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (May 2013)
Publisher synopsis: Sheldon Horowitz — widowed, impatient, impertinent — has grudgingly agreed to leave New York and move in with his granddaughter, Rhea, and her new husband, Lars, in Norway: a country of blue and ice with one thousand Jews, not one of them a former Marine sniper in the Korean War turned watch repairman, who failed his only son by sending him to Vietnam to die. Not until now, anyway.
Home alone one morning, Sheldon witnesses a dispute between the woman who lives upstairs and an aggressive stranger. When events turn dire, Sheldon seizes and shields the neighbor's young son from the violence, and they flee the scene. But old age and circumstances are altering Sheldon's experience of time and memory. He is haunted by dreams of his son Saul's life and by guilt over his death. As Sheldon and the boy look for a haven in an alien world, reality and fantasy, past and present, weave together, forcing them ever forward to a wrenching moment of truth.
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