really not sure how to rate this. the writing (in translation) was very good. but i didn't like the story or the characters. interesting definitely. but i'm glad to be done with it.

I’ll be reading more from this author. Complex, real, relatable characters. It’s a Nordic murder mystery but not really about the whodunnit and all about the people around it and their ordinary problems.

This one is kind of a miss, but there are enough bright spots that it makes me want to read something else by her. I loved the last scene, but otherwise it's just kind of, almost a really good book, except that it's not.

I've had to revise my assessment of this in light of my subsequent reads.

This is not a murder mystery it is actually a post mortem on a failed marriage and an abusive mother-daughter relationship. The chief plot mechanism is that everything is sucked into the vortex of those relationships and the plot advances.

Boring, repetitive and full of annoying and depressing characters.

The Cold Song may be centred around a murder, but it is most certainly not about one. Milla, the murdered girl, is a victim only to Ullman's writing. How Ullman trusses Milla up in the ties that bind the lives of this town, ties that become tenuous, fraught with everyday frustrations - husbands that cheat but who still love, daughters that yell 'fuck you, mama', mothers that drink, and so the list goes on; and so the ties tighten, the reader is on the ropes now. And so Milla dies; the ties snap soon enough, how come she is the one attenuated with scars? Curious are the tensions that surround this spellbound town, and haunt the reader in the best way.

Very quick-moving portrait of a family that fails to communicate at an alarming rate. A dreary, novel that doesn't say a lot, but shows plenty. The 'mystery' is a subplot that ends with a whisper; the family provides plenty of noise to keep interested, though. Some of the characters apathy verged on unbelievability. Well-written and interesting take on a modern family.

3.5 stars. So much dysfunction and foreboding. But in lovely prose. The people in this story are broken and all their tensions are set against a Norwegian noir backdrop. The main characters are a a couple trying to cope in a damaged marriage as it plays out in the midst of a violent crime, the husband's writer's block, his infidelity, the wife's stress and resentments, a daughter's strangeness, and the depressed, then alcoholic, then demented mother and her odd caretaker. There is a lot of repetition in the prose and there is a lot of counting of things, perhaps in an attempt to account for things. The characters are frustrating because even when they acknowledge their flaws, they do nothing to fix them. Overall, I enjoyed it.

The Cold Song by Linn Ullmann

It is always dangerous for an author to populate a novel with unlikeable characters. While Ullmann does a fantastic job in constructing the world of this novel, its echoes of dead children, damaged and grieving parents, broken marriages and disintegrating lives weigh heavy on the reader.

Part multi-generational familial psychodrama, black comedy, and murder mystery, I found this one a collection of parts that never quite coalesced as a whole. Despite everything that happens (and a whole lot happens), there’s a dull miasma that hangs heavy in the air weighing everyone down.

The narrative jumps forward and backwards in time and frequently switches perspective among its many characters. While the experimentation is tolerable, the book did lose momentum for me after a solid buildup.

⭐ ⭐ ⭐