This book started out well with the Chilean torture victim's survival tale and adjusting to life in Copenhagen but once the author spent time with the female character's dying parents and despicable boyfriend, I was through with it. These characters seem to be peripheral and do not add to the story. Skimmed through to see if anything changed, but was not encouraged to finish the book in spite of some good writing. ( )

I finished this novel feeling like I'd just read something great, but without that common feeling that I wanted more - what happens next? where's the sequel? I mean this in a very positive way. Kennedy tells a complete story here, even though he introduces four very complex people going through very difficult times. You come out on the other end with a strong sense that these characters have come through something life changing and are now ready to move on to whatever is next.

I'd call this a dark novel only in that it seems to present between its covers nearly the whole range of emotions connected with human relationships, and, let's face it, a lot of it is dark.

Kennedy's prose is fabulous, both in the beauty of the language and its use in drawing the reader into the story. I know some reviewers have commented on the presence of sex and torture, but these are present only as backdrops to help the reader try to comprehend the mind that is being investigated in the foreground. And don't worry, it's far less graphic than most novels you're likely to pickup at the airport bookstore.

When this story is over, you can look back and see ways in which each major character has had an effect, positive, negative, or both, on each other major character, even when they may have never met. Quite a fulfilling read, wonderfully described, and full of powerful insights into individuals and inter-relatedness.

Os. ( )

I won this beautifully and sensitively written book as an ARC from Goodreads. The author did a superb job of weaving together the narratives of the main characters - their stories, as well as the portrait of Denmark have stayed with me for weeks after I finished the book. ( )

This was a short touching story. I little predictable for me as a reader, but not bad in the least. Yet another quick pleasure read from Adam Drake. ( )

Out of the ruined lives of people crippled by evil and misery, Kennedy manages to create a spiritual and uplifting story of hope and redemption.

This is a beautiful tender novel about Nardo, a Chilean victim of the Pinochet torture regime who now lives and is being treated for his emotional scars in Copenhagen. He is a frightened shell of a man – “Never be a man again,” Frog Face had promised him when he was his captive – who cowers in the corner of his room when he hears foot steps on the stair, and is belligerently resistant to his therapist, Dr. Kristensen.

Nardo meets a Danish woman, Michela Ibsen who is divorced from an abusive husband and involved with a man named Voss, 10 years her junior. She is a lost soul, suffering pangs of guilt because she could not save her seventeen-year-old daughter from killing herself five years earlier. And Voss, is an immature, unstable, and violent man whose love for Michela is twisted by his perverted sexual jealousy. Michela’s father and mother are both patients in the same hospital. Her father is dying from colon cancer and remains mean-spirited and bitter to the end, while her mother is blissful and ignorant due to dementia.

How all these people, except Michela’s mother, come to terms with what they believe are their weaknesses is the beautiful story. An elegant and important novel, well written, and filled with compassion tinged with Christianity without dogma that mends hearts and returns dignity to these damaged people. ( )