> Un thriller étrange, morbide et moderne, d’une densité et d’une poésie puissantes, qui met en scène des personnages vivant sur le fil de la réalité.
--Le Monde des livres

> Dans le second roman de Monika Fagerholm, le fait divers retrouve de sa superbe, à l’antique.
--Nils C. Ahl, Le Monde

A bit confusing at times, but in a good way that keeps the story's mystery/ies alive, and that respects the reader's ability to infer and imagine on his/her own. ( )

For the first 100 pages the book was nearly impossible to read. But after that it became one of the few best books I've read for the last few years. The emotional variety is unbelievable. It also displays incredibly well how deeply people can burrow into conjectures and illusions and how tragic the consequences of silence can be. ( )

The American Girl, set in the mid-seventies, is the coming of age story of Doris and Sandra, two girls growing up in the District, a rural, marshy area outside of a city. The story begins a decade or so earlier, when a recent addition to the District's inhabitants -- the titular American girl -- drowned in the marsh; her boyfriend, a local boy, committed suicide the same day. What really happened back then has never come to light; clearly some members of the close and self-contained rural community are keeping secrets. By the time Doris and Sandra take an interest in the mystery, the case has become a part of the local mythology for locals and newcomers alike, a mystery ripe for the solving, yet safeguarded from outside (or inside) involvement. It is through elaborate games of make-belief and an intensely close friendship with each other that the girls engage with a long-kept mystery that has been influencing their world and everyone in it.

First, the good parts.

It took me about half of the book before managed to appreciate Fagerholm's style. She encodes her story as a stream of consciousness, royally salted with unfinished phrases, repetitions ("so to speak", "in other words", "this is how it was"); it meanders in the way of someone who is working their way towards a point but has to introduce several side-issues along the way. And because much of the story is presented as characters' ruminations and memories, this style is -- in theory -- eminently fitting to the narration.

Similarly meandering is this book on the level of the plot: the approach is cyclical rather than chronological, with scenes being endlessly revisited much in the way that uncomfortable or unresolved memories might be. But each time an event rolls around again, the reader has been presented with more context to place this scene in. For every scene, event or realization, the author establishes links with numerous others: all events are connected -- causally, emotionally, via the repetition of phrases, or through characters seeing resemblances. Everything becomes part of an all-encompassing whole, the American girl's death sticking out as unexplored white on a world map.

But, and here comes the but, all of it -- the halting style, the achronological narrative, the interconnected network of meaning coming at readers -- goes to such an extent that nothing stands out from its surroundings any more. And it was at that point that the book lost me: the conceit may be interesting, but it failed to grip me.

Another consequence of the memory approach to narration is that all characters' voices end up feeling the same: a confused and abused eight-year-old, an immigrated young American, a disillusioned stripper, teenage girls coming of age -- they all sound exactly like each other, and like the narrator. Perhaps that was the point, but I couldn't help but feel that all the effort put into creating a unique style had overshot its goal and was now driving the book into tedium. When every event and dialogue in the book is pregnant with the same level of relevance and importance, and narrated in the same voice, the effect is one of oversaturation. Fagerholm comes off as trying too hard to prove too much. There is a word for that, but I don't like using it, so I'm not yet going to say it.

In addition, the truth behind the mysteries turns out to be not that earth-shattering, the games set up for dealing with growing up and keeping secrets not that engaging. And so, for me, much of the book's cyclical nature comes down to empty gesturing standing in for substance. And again, there is a word for that, but I’m not going to use it quite yet.

And finally, one part of the ending in particular, where all threads come together and the secrets are finally laid bare, annoyed me to no end: while not at all of the “And it was all just a dream” kind, that part of the dénouement is at least equally lazy and unnecessary. It felt like a twist for the sake of a twist, an underwhelming revelation presented as a copernican revolution of emotions. And there is a word for that.

So i think it's time for me to come out and say it: i found this book pretentious. And I mean that in the sense of it thinking it is cleverer than it really is, that it imbues the events that happen in it with an unwarranted importance and then takes itself way too seriously for it. Like Doris and Sandra, The American Girl is unable to contextualize its struggles. I do realize that the book is told from the perspective of young teens from dysfunctional families who indeed cannot see past their own problems, but that does not excuse the sameness of voice, the gratuitous significance given to every dialogue and revelation, and the underwhelming conclusion. Fagerholm has simply taken the conceit too far.

And after 500 pages of excessively self-important ruminating on an overblown mystery and a disappointing reveal, it almost feels like an insult when the book ends with a "to be continued." The sequel, I gather, deals with someone's daughter a few decades down the line trying to figure out the same mystery, as well as her family's role in the mystery and the ensuing influence it has had on the District -- all of which was explored in this book. I don't care if the sequel will reveal that the resolution presented here should be ponderously recontextualized, or if it throws the heavy light of a new perspective on the American girl's death and the involvement of all the families in the District; I've not the least inclination to go through the same experience again (and again and again). ( )

The American Girl is an unusual mystery story that is presented in overlapping cycles. Monika Fagerholm describes the characters’ perceptions and thoughts by cycling past, present, and future scenes, always moving toward solving an apparent murder. There is a mixture of reality, premonition, fantasy, and tragedy in the novel.

The coming of age of a main character, Sandra, provides a framework for understanding the mystery that is constructed mostly from her exaggerated inner life. In an interesting stream of consciousness style, readers are taken backward and forward in time. They gradually tease apart fact and illusion realizing the truth about the murder in the latter part of the book. The end of the novel sets the stage for the second novel in the series, The Glitter Scene.

I enjoyed the novel and look forward to reading the next book. The style and insightful themes remind me of Sigrid Undset’s novel, Jenny. A common theme to both writers is, for all of us, the world opens itself for a short moment then closes again. Some readers may become impatient with the cycling of the timeline that leads to repetition as the plot expands. But, each repetition adds something new to the solving of the mystery. ( )