Read this in Swedish and enjoyed the way of storytelling, I understand its more about self-discovery within the characters than just finding out the truth about the place they live in and the history about the American girl. It's got this mystic quality to it, mixing rumours and daydreams to the girls Sandra and Doris' own reality and we are allowed to watch as they peel off the layers.

Sometimes hard to follow, but I would recommend it as a beach read. Not your regular detective book, but a genre of its own. I was charming to read about fantasies and stories that the girls told each other, their friendship was so innocent and pure, and so realistic IMO.

I really think something must have gotten lost in the translation of this book. The storytelling is incredibly disjointed, and it doesn't feel as though it's a stylistic decision- it feels sloppy and confused. The title of the book doesn't really match up with the story, because we never really learn anything about "The American Girl" - instead we follow a bunch of half-baked characters around as they try to find out how and why she died. The author never explores the characters' inner worlds; instead she continues to tell the story from the outside so that we will remain as confused as possible throughout the entire book. The main characters, Sandra and Doris, seem to feel strong emotions that are never explained to us. We have to figure out how they feel from the random and shocking decisions they make. People are constantly killing themselves or each other and having sex and abusing one another and telling lies, but it's up to us to make up the underlying motives because the author doesn't create any for us. I finished the book because I wanted to know how the American girl really died, but the ending wasn't really worth it.

500 pages of nothing important. You would think there would be SOMETHING that I liked about this, seeing how I finished it and it's about a murder. But yeah. Maybe the translation wasn't good? I can tell this author's writing style was maybe supposed to be really poetic, tons of metaphors and stuff, but I don't think it came across right in English. There were a couple scenes that were really beautiful though, and these scenes, few and far between, might be the only reason I read this much about two girls growing up in a world that seemingly never changes. It was extremely hard for me to keep characters and relationships straight at first, and I also had trouble telling the time passing between key events (and by key events I mean characters' deaths. I don't feel like this is a hard-hitting spoiler in any way because the deaths almost seem unimportant to the story). There was some sort of resolution, but it didn't feel satisfying, maybe because I didn't experience a real sense of build-up to get there. I didn't feel like any resolution was completely deserved.

For the first 100 pages the book was nearly impossible to read. But after that it became one of the few best books I've read for the last few years. The emotional variety is unbelievable. It also displays incredibly well how deeply people can burrow into conjectures and illusions and how tragic the consequences of silence can be.