Left parentless by her mother\u2019s death, Unnur grew up under painful circumstances. At age 11, she\u2019s dumped at a coastal work farm by her mother\u2019s 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\u2019s 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, \u201cH\u0153 Unna. Remember me?\u201d Only one person ever called her that: Freyja. When Unnur\u2019s long-absent ex-husband, N\u00f3i, shows up with a surprise wife, L\u00f3a\u2014and an even bigger surprise, a little girl named Freyja\u2014the unnerving of Unnur continues. Still to come: threats to her custody of Lilja by L\u00f3a, a shady antagonist who turns out to be a police detective investigating the original Freyja\u2019s disappearance. Melding past and present, Thors effectively toys with the impulsive Unnur\u2019s own dark secrets and reliability as a narrator\u2014one who can\u2019t remember \u201cwhat kind of things [she] had done.\u201d 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\u2019s raw emotion and the book\u2019s atmospheric pull are difficult to resist.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Left parentless by her mother\u2019s death, Unnur grew up under painful circumstances. At age 11, she\u2019s dumped at a coastal work farm by her mother\u2019s 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\u2019s made a playground of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":6999,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6998"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6998"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6998\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}