Cecilia Wilborg
lacks nothing; she has what seems to be a perfect life with her husband and two
daughters, though it soon becomes clear that she is keeping some dark secrets
from her family. They end up providing a
temporary foster home for a young boy named Tobias, and Cecilia’s life starts
to unravel when she learns he has connections to Annika Lucasson. Annika, a drug addict with an abusive
drug-dealing boyfriend, is privy to Cecilia’s secrets which if revealed would
destroy her life.
The novel
has three narrators. Cecilia’s
first-person narration is interspersed with some chapters from Tobias’
perspective, also written in the first person, and some journal entries and
letters written by Annika. Cecilia’s
narration becomes annoying because she keeps withholding information. Instead, she just goes on and on about her
fears that her life will disintegrate: “I’m
overwhelmed by a sensation of the past as a slithering snake sneaking up on me,
ready to unleash its poison on this immaculate life I’ve fought so hard for”
and “maybe [Tobias’ presence] won’t dislodge those huge, black boulders inside
of me and send them crashing onto this life I’ve managed to preserve against
some hefty odds” and “his very presence threatens to unleash a wave of grief
and regret so huge it would knock me down forever if I don’t keep suppressing
it at any cost.”
Cecilia is
not a likeable person; she certainly did not get any sympathy from me. She is materialistic: “being me is very expensive” and “I prefer my
surroundings to be beautiful at all times.”
She is very shallow, constantly making judgments about people based on
their appearance: “Back then she was a
timid, chubby girl with messy pigtails and hand-me-down clothes, and she’s not
really that different now. Scruffy is the word that comes to
mind. I must admit that she’s gone from
awkwardly tall and “big-boned” to what I suppose some people might call
statuesque, but she most definitely retains that gangly, clownish presence I
remember from childhood.”
The
decisions she made in the past and continues to make reveal her to be
narcissistic and self-absorbed. She once
met a man and “less than ten minutes after he sat down beside me, Thiago was
inside me”?! She is not the greatest of mothers; she
complains how her daughters keep viewing YouTube makeup tutorials and are
constantly arguing, but she does nothing to intervene. Johan, Cecilia’s husband, once tells her, “’You’re
a bitch. You can be so much more than
that, and you know I love you dearly, but sometimes you really are a bitch.’” That describes her perfectly. As more and more about Cecilia is revealed, I
ended up not caring what happened to her.
Several
events are just unbelievable. I know
nothing about Child Services in Norway but I can’t imagine that they would
place a vulnerable child in a foster home that had not been properly vetted. A child in foster care could suffer an injury
and the family could keep him from attending school for some time and
authorities wouldn’t care? Then when the
scar from the injury is obvious, no one would investigate? Then there are the many coincidences. Tobias gives Cecilia a key that, pardon the
pun, unlocks everything? How
convenient! Even the ownership of a farmhouse
is connected to both Cecilia and Annika’s families?
The book is
described as a “gritty novel of psychological suspense.” There is grit since the novel includes
substance abuse, prostitution, rape, physical abuse, abandoned children, and
murder, but the glacial pace means there is little suspense. In fact, the nature of Cecilia’s secrets is
not difficult to guess long before the truth is revealed. Even the title is misleading; Tobias is never
a boy at the door.
Note: I received a digital galley of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.
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