On the Bookshelf: I Remember You

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I Remember You
By Yrsa Sigurdardottir
My rating:  5 out of 5 *****
Click here to buy on Amazon

It has been a long time since I read a book that made me so scared that I had to turn a light on before I went to bed.  This book gave me the serious creeps. Yrsa Sigurdardottir’s ghost story takes place in Iceland, and her description of that setting was masterful. It’s almost as if the setting were another character, it is so intricately wound into the fabric of the story. The hardest part for me was getting used to the names of people and places – there were hard to pronounce!  But that didn’t stop me from enjoying it in the slightest.

This book switches between two seemingly unrelated plotlines.  In the first, three friends head to their new rental vacation home to renovate it before the summer season starts.  This property is in the deserted village of Hesteyri, and the trio soon find they aren’t as alone as they thought – there is a dark force lurking.  The second plotline follows a psychologist, Freyr, who is helping the police investigate a woman’s suicide, and dealing with a heartbreak of his own – his young son completely vanished three years prior.  This heartbreak haunts him, literally and figuratively.

The chapters alternate between the first plotline and the second and Sigurdardottir is masterful in ending each one  with a cliffhanger. I had to stop myself from skipping over the next chapter to find out what happened to the characters.  Each piece of the story added to the suspense and it took me almost to the end of the book to see how all the pieces came together.  It kept me guessing the whole time!

Netflix has the movie version of this story and when I found that out, I couldn’t wait to watch it.  Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the movie was nowhere near as good. It completely changed the character of Bernodus, the ghost, and took liberties with the ending as well.  While the book was definitely a five-star, the movie was no more than two.

If this sounds like a book for you, you may want to also try
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters!

That’s it for today!  Thanks for reading this post.  Until next time, happy reading!