What do You think about A Bridge To The Stars (2007)?
I was 85% through this book when I put it down for good. I never stop in the middle of books. This book was simply THAT BAD.I started reading the book in the mistaken belief that it was a Kurt Wallender mystery. In fact, it is one of a series of coming-of-age tales with an 11-year-old boy, Joel, at their center. Joel lives with his dad in the far, cold north of Sweden, eats boiled potatoes every night for dinner, wonders about his absent mom, and wanders the streets at the witching hour as part of a 'secret society' he has invented to embrace his quest after a mysterious dog. That's it. Maybe this is delightful in Swedish, in Sweden, where many readers find that it evokes and brings to life their innocent backgrounds in humble, rural (wintry) surroundings. Maybe it's a translation problem (the prose is so workaday, so uninspired, that its shortcomings could only be made up for by brilliant plotting ... of which there is no trace here). In short, I found it all boring as hell. The Catcher in the Rye, this is not. Not recommended to anyone who is not from Sweden, and recommended to very few Swedes.
—M.J. Fiori
A beautiful story about a young boy Joel whose mother left him and whose father works in woods. Now he is scared that his father will leave him too. He meets a new friend that is sadly not the right for him - Ture - he is trying to scare the other people in town which is something that Joel doesn't want to do. In the end he nearly dies while climibing on a bridge as a part of the pact that they made and he decides to stay away from him. He ends up making two other friends instead - one being an elderly man that was deemed insane and the other being a lady without a nose - he destroys her flowers while he was still with Ture but she ends up forgiving him and they become good friends. At the end of the book his father reassures him that he is staying, they start talking about the mother and he promises his son that they are moving back near the sea after he is done with school.
—Lucario
Some very stirring scenes in this one, though inconsistent. A young boy, unhappy because his mother has left him and his father, falls under the spell of a friend. Together the two flirt with evil . . . our hero drawn in by the spell the other boys casts on him. The climactic scene--our hero climbs a railway trestle because of a dare--is wonderful, but too much of the book is predictable. Unhappy boy meets eccentric adults (noseless woman, crazy man) who show him that life encompasses more than the ordinary and teach him lessons he'd never learn in school. Definitely uneven. Mankell's adult mysteries are much better.
—Carl
