A review by sadiereadsagain
The Orange Girl by Jostein Gaarder

4.0

This book disarmed me, I don't know what I expected going into it but I got something I hadn't anticipated. This is such a simple book - a son is given a letter written to him by his father in his final days when the boy was just a toddler, which contains the mystery of his father's first love. But the simplicity is deceptive. I had expected to read about loss and love, and there is certainly that. But this is almost a smoke screen to the core of this story, which is to ask a big question about the point of existence. Especially considering that I was initially uncomfortable with where this story was headed, given the father's obsessive tracking of a woman he'd barely met whom he'd decided was his soul mate, I'm glad I stuck with it. The themes of fairy tale and whether pleasure is worth the pain of inevitably having to lose it all transformed this from an unrealistic love story into something much deeper.