Sara Kadefors

Kyla is exactly the kind of girl Alex could never talk to in real life. She's a gorgeous, outspoken L.A. girl who parties to forget about her absent father and depressed mother. He's a shy ballet dancer from outside San Francisco who's never been kissed. Luckily, when these sixteen-year-olds meet for the first time it's not in real life - it's in a chat room, where they can share their feelings of isolation and frustration away from the conformity-obsessed high school scene. Alex and Kyla show more quickly forge a friendship that's far from virtual - maybe they're even falling in love. But what happens when the soul mate you've never met moves from online to in person? show less

Sylvia lives in her car in a little grove behind IKEA. Most of her day she spends in the warehouse – using her respectable façade as a cover as she’s drinking the free morning coffee, washing up in the toilets, stealing leftovers in the restaurant and taking small naps in the bed department. But it wasn’t always like this. Just a half year ago, she lived in a stable middle class family in a stable middle class suburb. After doing something unforgiveable to her daughter, she just left. show more Dropped out. Ran.

One night, she picks up a hitch-hiker on one of her nightly aimless drives: Lisbeth, who both uses and sells drugs. Reluctantly, Lisbeth lets her stay at her place, and the meeting with a completely different world changes Sylvia’s outlook on life. In the end, she can’t escape anymore. She needs to get back to where she came from, and face the life she left behind.

I listened to the first half of this while walking Fotrally, and it was a good book for that: sort of light without being fluffy, and told in a sure, no-nonsense style. I like how Kadefors always works with class as a major theme in her books, and the way she withholds the reasons for Sylvia’s dropping out is very well paced. The plot, simple as it is, is effective and engaging. On the minus side she seems to come close to clichés a lot of the time, and several of the characters, even bigger ones, stay firmly two dimensional. Still, not at all bad for a book I picked mainly because there was little to choose from in mp3-format at the local library. show less

Jonas lives a good life. Two kids, a successful painting business, married to the woman of his dreams, planning to finally buying a house. He’s the reliable sort, not comfortable in the spotlight, not a dinner speaker perhaps, but a beloved kids’ coach in both football and handball. But inside, Jonas is full of self hate, insecurities and feelings of inferiority. His white trash background, his dyslexia, his uninterested father form a hole inside him. And at the bottom of that hole is a show more nagging, black guilt that he’s never even begun to deal with. When Jonas wife decides to divorce him, he falls freely into an abyss of depression, anger and demons from the past.

In cross cut chapters we meet Jonas now, and in the childhood he never speaks of – when he was just another no good punk on the backyard of the welfare state, drinking, smoking weed, boffing, getting crappy grades and breaking into summer houses. And we get to know what really happened that summer night, many years ago, when Rebecka, the light in his life, died in a moped accident.

Kadefors has a keen eye for class especially. Like in her other books, this is a story of luggage, of falling out of the frame, of being unable to keep up. And Jonas’ inferiority visavi the other middle class people around him is as painful to read as it rings true. The same goes for his desperate, crude attempts at revenge. Unfortunately, Kadefors also has a tendency of writing stereotypes a lot of the time, and many secondary characters feel like flat clichés.

I listed to most of this during my long Fotrally, and as a book for such an occasion it worked well – substantial but not hard to follow, with a touch of simplification suitable for a tired head (It just so happens I listened to Kadefors during last year’s hike too!) show less

En lite annorlunda berättelse. Den är sorglig och djup men ändå underhållande. Det är dock ett taskigt format vilket gör att det är svårt att läsa och hålla koll på repliker.