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The Kingdom
Feb. 17th, 2025 07:10 pmI had previously been aware of Jo Nesbo as a well-known author but never read any of his books. Then I picked up The Kingdom from the free station book exchange near where I live - and read all 650 pages in four days.
It's about Roy, who runs a service station in a small Norwegian mountain village and Carl, his younger brother, who comes home from 15 years in Canada with a wife and a plan to build a fancy hotel above the village. What it's really about is complex family obligations, multiple layers of twisted obligation - and lots of murdering...
I had been warned that Nesbo's writing is very violent - and the first few pages were certainly very unpleasant. But after that, there wasn't anything else in the rest of the book that caused me any problems in terms of squick level.
I connected to Roy (the first person protagonist) very quickly and got invested in his story. I thought the different relationships in the book were well portrayed and the various histories and secrets of small village life were compelling. There was also a lot of interesting discussion of language between the brothers and Carl's wife, who was from Barbados - made even more interesting by the challenges of the book being translated from Norwegian.
Some of the foreboding and hints about what may or may not have happened in the past were a bit heavy-handed, and also revealed too early to be credible as real theories, but Nesbo very cleverly makes both Roy and Carl very likeable in the first 200 pages, leading to the reader probably rooting for them longer than they should...
There was a bit of an abrupt shift in tone a few times (and bits of it were unexpectedly funny) - and the 90-page flashback that happened almost exactly at the halfway point to reveal the whole history of the plot felt like a very odd way to go about things.
But it kept me reading right to the end - though the last few chapters went a bit far for me and I felt the ending let down an otherwise really engaging book.
It's about Roy, who runs a service station in a small Norwegian mountain village and Carl, his younger brother, who comes home from 15 years in Canada with a wife and a plan to build a fancy hotel above the village. What it's really about is complex family obligations, multiple layers of twisted obligation - and lots of murdering...
I had been warned that Nesbo's writing is very violent - and the first few pages were certainly very unpleasant. But after that, there wasn't anything else in the rest of the book that caused me any problems in terms of squick level.
I connected to Roy (the first person protagonist) very quickly and got invested in his story. I thought the different relationships in the book were well portrayed and the various histories and secrets of small village life were compelling. There was also a lot of interesting discussion of language between the brothers and Carl's wife, who was from Barbados - made even more interesting by the challenges of the book being translated from Norwegian.
Some of the foreboding and hints about what may or may not have happened in the past were a bit heavy-handed, and also revealed too early to be credible as real theories, but Nesbo very cleverly makes both Roy and Carl very likeable in the first 200 pages, leading to the reader probably rooting for them longer than they should...
There was a bit of an abrupt shift in tone a few times (and bits of it were unexpectedly funny) - and the 90-page flashback that happened almost exactly at the halfway point to reveal the whole history of the plot felt like a very odd way to go about things.
But it kept me reading right to the end - though the last few chapters went a bit far for me and I felt the ending let down an otherwise really engaging book.
