The American Girl

February 15, 2010
This third, unusual novel from Fagerholm ("Wonderful Women by the Sea") is a hypnotic coming-of-age story that hinges on a dark but powerful bond between two Finnish girls growing up in the swamplands of outer Helsinki. Born to jet-setter parents, timid young Sandra finds strength by clinging to obstinate, wild-eyed Doris, who is no stranger to dysfunction herself: her mother has a hundred thousand excuses for beating her daughter. The two begin to obsess over an unsolved death that haunts the town. Making up games in abandoned pools, basements, and the muddy marshlands, the girls dress alike and begin to form solipsistic creeds, such as the belief that suffering has developed a hidden power in us that makes it so that we can see what no one else sees. The fractured work can by tryingtheres no straight chronology, and sentences are frequently appealingly off-balance (kudos to Tucker for the slick translation)but Fagerholms esoteric prose and her omnipotent narrators eye bring to life a world of ambient longings, cryptic memories, and ethereal figures. "(Feb.)" .

March 1, 2010
The death by drowning of the eponymous female during a visit to Finland in 1969 stirs up waves that flow through several lives for years thereafter, in this third novel from the popular European author.

Fagerholm (Wonderful Women By the Sea, 1997) openly challenges readers with a 12-page overture that suggests the mysterious effect of itinerant Eddie de Wire (the deceased, who evokes memories of Andy Warhol's unstable"superstar" Edie Sedgwick) on the friendless adolescent boy Bengt (aka Bencku) who finds her body, and on two teenaged girls, Doris and Sandra. The latter two are for different reasons family-less, and are brought—ironically—together and pulled apart by the flickering, briefly glimpsed shadow of the improbably glamorous, albeit unquestionably seductive Eddie. Fagerholm's almost aggressively lyrical prose style (at least, as persuasively rendered by translator Tucker) feels forced at times, and her employment of fragmented narrative and time scheme, as well as multiple points of view, keeps the story at a distance from even the most willing reader. But there is much to admire here, including a precise, bitterly funny rendering of life in"The District," a posh coastal development near Helsinki, bordered on one side by ocean and on the other by marshlands which perhaps offer a gracious nod to Dickens's masterpiece Great Expectations—as does Fagerholm's piercing depiction of the awkward misfit Bencku's fervent yearnings to fit in, and belong. But the novel's center is rightly occupied by the duo of"knocked-about trash kid" Doris and emotionally frail, neurotic Sandra—and the lingering aftermath of their collusion, intimacy and estrangement. Fagerholm pointedly demonstrates that the cycle of hopefulness and disillusionment will embrace subsequent generations.

A genuinely gripping, if demanding novel, the first of an announced two-volume work. Many readers will eagerly await this richly imagined story's continuation.

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February 1, 2010
This latest work by Fagerholm ("Wonderful Women by the Sea"), set in the Swedish-speaking community of Finland, was a best seller in Sweden and won several literary prizes. While Scandinavian mysteries are now popular in the U.S. market, this is not a conventional mystery, though it does center on the drowning of a young American, Eddie de Wire, on the coast of Finland in 1969. The novel explores, from many directions, the effect of the American girl's death on the local youth at the time, particularly two troubled girls named Sandra and Doris. A reader in search of a straightforward, linear story might feel like someone lost in the woods who soon discovers that he or she has been going around in circles. VERDICT Fagerholm's use of words to conceal more than to reveal might appeal to those who are up for the challenge of interpreting this effusive yet oblique style of storytelling. Other readers can pass.Leslie Patterson, Brown Univ. Lib., Providence

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