A review by costa_steinunn
Kin by Snorri Kristjansson
4.0
Helga Finnsdottir is grown with her adoptive family in East Norway in 970 c., but when the whole family gathers in the father house and Helga meets for the first time her adoptive sibling, she realizes that she doesn't actually know her own family, that some secrets divide it. That was supposed to be a feast that turns into a nightmare. Dissent and hints worm among the siblings. The legend of a hoard brought by the father from his journeys but never found lingers together with the murder of two of the brothers. In spite of herself, Helga is forced to doubt her certainties to find the murderer, and this brings her to understand that the farm where she's grown it's no more her home. She needed to find her place in the world.
"Kin" is to me that kind of story come by chance and you like not knowing why. I'm not fond of mystery, though this caught me, probably because the setting is an age I love to study, because of its characters and their relationships, because as I read it seemed to hold in my hand a real Saga of Icelanders, with its simple but not banal and evocative style.
I liked the social representation. For once, in a book set in the Viking Age, the Viking warriors, the violence of the weapons and the blood are not leading. Violence, of course, isn't absent, but it's the subtle one, the sneaky violence of manipulation.
"Kin" is to me that kind of story come by chance and you like not knowing why. I'm not fond of mystery, though this caught me, probably because the setting is an age I love to study, because of its characters and their relationships, because as I read it seemed to hold in my hand a real Saga of Icelanders, with its simple but not banal and evocative style.
I liked the social representation. For once, in a book set in the Viking Age, the Viking warriors, the violence of the weapons and the blood are not leading. Violence, of course, isn't absent, but it's the subtle one, the sneaky violence of manipulation.