Score: 3.5/5 Bookmarks

I like a good thriller, especially a legal one, so I was excited when I received an advance reader copy of A Nearly Normal Family by M.T. Edvardsson (translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles). It’s set in a small-ish city in Sweden and tells the story of a teenage girl accused of murder, and we see the story unfold from the father’s point of view first, then the teenager’s, then her mother’s.

It was a reasonable read, but I found the pacing slower than I would have liked and the story to be a little too predictable. I was hoping for a dramatic twist, but it ended exactly how I thought it was going to, which was a little disappointing. Once you get through the father’s account, which is the first third of the book, it picks up a little.

If you’ve read A Nearly Normal Family leave me a comment and let me know what you thought.

Synopsis:

M.T. Edvardsson’s A Nearly Normal Family is a gripping legal thriller that forces the reader to consider: How far would you go to protect the ones you love? In this twisted narrative of love and murder, a horrific crime makes a seemingly normal family question everything they thought they knew about their life—and one another.

Eighteen-year-old Stella Sandell stands accused of the brutal murder of a man almost fifteen years her senior. She is an ordinary teenager from an upstanding local family. What reason could she have to know a shady businessman, let alone to kill him?

Stella’s father, a pastor, and mother, a criminal defense attorney, find their moral compasses tested as they defend their daughter, while struggling to understand why she is a suspect. Told in an unusual three-part structure, A Nearly Normal Familyasks the questions: How well do you know your own children? How far would you go to protect them?