Rating: 
Summary: Smilla meets Snow Falling...
Review: It is lazy of me to make such an obvious comparison but this book reminded me of both Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow and Snow Falling On Cedars.It has the same sense of place as Peter Hoeg's novel and the way is captures the feel of the Scandanavian landscape and people is wonderfully evocative. At the same time it is a rather gripping whodunnit a la David Guterson's book and the combination of the two makes this a wonderful and gripping read. One criticism which another of other reviewers here have flagged up is the translation. I am no expert on this stuff but at times I was very aware that I was reading a translation (and therefore an interpretation) of the original work and some passages were stilted and didn't flow as much as others. Obviously this may be the case in the original language but I wouldn't have thought so. I found myself reading some passages two or three times as they didn't make sense immediately. Nonetheless it is a novel worth the effort and I would like to read more of her work in English.
Rating: 
Summary: comment
Review: The reading enjoyment was marred only by typos and some awkward sentences. The U.S. publisher should have sprung for a quick copyread, which would have caught these annoying errors.
Rating:
Summary: Taunt mystery
Review: This eerie story, set in Sweden, opens with a midsummers night murder. Intriguing characters, off-beat situations, a cult, a commune, a suspicious village, a fanatical mom -- kept me up all night. Not a great 'have-to-read-it" book, yet still a good read.
Rating:
Summary: Black thoughts
Review: This is a book full of people with secrets, people who had a hand in it, people who could have done it, people who were thought to have done it. A book that you need to read twice over to tie it all together, to pick up the clues once you know the ending. It's all there, but like the paths through the vanished forest, they are hard to find. A complex book, full of strands that diverge, cometogether, lie dormant for years, and finally tie themselves up in a sad little package. The list of characters helps. A little. A map would help even more. A dark and difficult book. Full of atmosphere. Full of seasonal details. Full of fascinating, well-worked out characters. Full of secrets.
Rating: 
Summary: An astonishing and terrifying thriller
Review: This is a must-read. Blackwater is a beautifully plotted thriller. It does what all good thrillers should do: it uses the mystery of a brutal crime to explore deeper, darker mysteries. I came to the book having read Ekman's The Forest of Hours, a novel which shares with Blackwater an obsession with time, memory and survival. Above all, Kerstin Ekman evokes the forces of nature with exquisite detail and passion. She is a writer of stature. We need more of her novels in English.
Rating:
Summary: An astonishing and terrifying thriller
Review: This is a must-read. Blackwater is a beautifully plotted thriller. It does what all good thrillers should do: it uses the mystery of a brutal crime to explore deeper, darker mysteries. I came to the book having read Ekman's The Forest of Hours, a novel which shares with Blackwater an obsession with time, memory and survival. Above all, Kerstin Ekman evokes the forces of nature with exquisite detail and passion. She is a writer of stature. We need more of her novels in English.
Rating:
Summary: A thoughtful, gripping and very human mystery.
Review: This novel, the first by Kerstin Ekman translated into English, is a thoughtful, gripping, and very human mystery. Highly recommended for anyone who enjoyed David Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars, the only weak part of this effort is the translation, which faltered slightly throughout. Ekman effectively engages the reader in the present before taking you back to a very different time, twenty years before. It is only after becoming quite comfortable with the characters and the life of Annie Raft that the reader is wrenched back to the present and the real mystery begins to unravel
Rating: 
Summary: In the Blackwaters of the mind
Review: This overlong, erratically structured novel nevertheless comes with a pedigree:native acclaim and (re: the blurb on the UK edition) the unstinting praise of Rose Tremain. Most pertinent of all, however, it is accredited 'an international bestseller'. In the light of the above, my contrariness may seem perverse. However, stuck for four hundred pages in the seemingly eternal daylight of the Nordic borderlands,the novel achieves only a sense of dark, dank ennui. Some turn to a novel for escape; I was willing to rake neighbours' lawns rather than persevere here. To itemise, briefly: The early stamina of the narrative (the Branbergs predominant) dissipates urgently; in a sense we are deceived as to the nature of the kind of book this is. The initial narrative, trotting along nicely, draws up abruptly and henceforward character description, marital dysfunction, and quasi-philosophical reflection take the race. We have unknowingly entered a dissolute world lacking in grace, that leaves us (like Annie Raft and Johan Branberg) all too often directionless. Nor is this disaffection implicitly a demand that a novel disarm, charm or delight:but with whom here are we to empathise; who here shows resolve; who here (not even nature)has compassion? (What signifies Ylja's release of the eel?) Structurally, BLACKWATER seems so discontinuous; the disjunctions in place, in time and character, may augment the sense of unease - an intended disquiet - but they lend the prose an added complexity without the requisite profundity. In conclusion, while the primary objection is on grounds of structure and length, it would be remiss not to enquire of other readers whether the overspillage of characters (only a handful of whom win credit in the cast list)has any function other than to confuse, and to serve the red-herring demands of the genre. One, of course, is detained by a little humility, aware not just of the possibility of gross error in one's judgement, but of the ease (and cowardice) with which such criticism is made. It is not intended as consolatory when I concede that, even in translation,the prose reads, in a manner reminiscent of Anne Michaels, deftly, economically, of cold-hearted times, in a cold country.
| 
