FREYJA

Left parentless by her mother’s death, Unnur grew up under painful circumstances. At age 11, she’s dumped at a coastal work farm by her mother’s intolerant identical twin sister. Unnur gets over her initial shock and dismay thanks to the presence of Freyja, a playful but elusive girl her age who’s made a playground of the rocky environs. But Freyja fails to return from one of her solo jaunts to what locals call the Dark Valley with its black-sand beach, leaving a swirl of urgent secrets behind her. Some crucial ones involve Elias, the aging American veteran who owns the farm. Flash forward to 2018, when Unnur is shaken out of a quiet existence with her 7-year-old daughter, Lilja, by a mysteriously delivered envelope of old Polaroids. It bears the words, “Hœ Unna. Remember me?” Only one person ever called her that: Freyja. When Unnur’s long-absent ex-husband, Nói, shows up with a surprise wife, Lóa—and an even bigger surprise, a little girl named Freyja—the unnerving of Unnur continues. Still to come: threats to her custody of Lilja by Lóa, a shady antagonist who turns out to be a police detective investigating the original Freyja’s disappearance. Melding past and present, Thors effectively toys with the impulsive Unnur’s own dark secrets and reliability as a narrator—one who can’t remember “what kind of things [she] had done.” Could she have done something terrible to her friend? A long section of belatedly presented material about the Icelandic mysticism Freyja was drawn to throws things a bit off keel. But the threatened mother’s raw emotion and the book’s atmospheric pull are difficult to resist.