Book Review The Crow Girl

Hi guys, it's Sophie. So today we're going to be doing a
review of The Crow Girl by Eric Axl Sund. Before we get started into the specifics
I'm going to do a sort of non-spoilery overview to begin with but
be aware that there will be spoilers I will mark them up before we go into
that section. So the basic synopsis is that the body of a murdered boy shows up and he has been brutally murdered, it looks as though he has been mummified and we follow the story of
Jeanette who is the main police officer investigating the case and a woman called Sofia, who's a clinical psychologist, who
at stages who helps her [Jeanette] to profile the killers and understand why they have chosen the victims they have.

There's also the added element of the fact that this boy it's an immigrant and therefore there's
not really all that much in terms of resources being given to the case so they are struggling against that as well. Okay so at the outset this sounds like just
the kind of thing I would normally enjoy. It sounds as though it's kind of dark
and twisted and might have some interesting elements. I really liked the fact that there was the psychology to it as well.

Unfortunately this book completely and utterly let me down. I didn't enjoy it at all. I only gave it one star which is really rare for me. So again on the themes of non-spoilers we'll start with the
writing.

The writing is incredibly lazy, and we'll go into a little bit more
about that in the spoiler section, but I. Had no sense of the authors had an
overarching story line in mind when they were writing. It felt very much as though they
were just picking things up as as they wanted to and dropping them off when it didn't suit. There wasn't really any eloquent to the prose.

The dialogue was ok and but yeah writing-wise I just didn't really find
anything there for me. There's a big problem with telling rather than showing
with the character development. So they insisted on writing, probably five
or six times, how hard it was for Jeanette to be a female police officer
and at no point did they really show her having any detriment from
having been a police officer. They didn't really, other than her own
perception of what characters were saying or doing, didn't really have
anything that meant that her life was particularly hard or any proof that it
was because she is a female.

Given what we know the story line as
we progress on, as they say spoilers, that'll come later, I don't
think she is a good police officer. I think they have legitimate reason for doubting her professional capability that is beyond the fact that she's female. That's just one example. There are
other times where they are pressing points on you really hard.

I felt it assumed that I wasn't picking up
on things as a reader and I found that really frustrating. Characters. I thought all of the characters were one-dimensional and poorly developed. Almost every single one.
Hurtig, I don't know how you say it, is probably only character I felt any vague sense of
being a real human and even then he became faintly ridiculous at points.

So I didn't think the characters were well done at all. So the author Eric Axl Sund is actually the pename for
a duo. These two men here. Who are called Jerker Eriksson and Hkan Axlander Sundquist.

And while we are talking about things that didn't work, because that's what the
majority of this video is going to be,  they didn't communicate as a pair of writers. One
thing that really irritated me throughout the entire book is clearly one of the two authors, I don't know which one of them it is, but clearly one of the two of them smokes and other one doesn't and throughout the book I've got so frustrated because all of
the characters would pick up a cigarette, be smoking, you know fairly
fluidly and all over the place and then you have four or
five chapters where they wouldn't smoke at all even in stressful situations. Which
indicates the other one doesn't smoke. The pair of just haven't spoken
about that, they haven't gone over the notes.

They haven't seen what the other is writing about and it's so frustrating. It just feels as though it's been really hastily edited and that the communication between the pair of them just wasn't there. There are other aspects too, in terms of
slight writing style differences, but that I can pass it's the characters
that irritate me. When they can't have consistent characters because that's so
important to have, especially when you have a duo that you have to
understand the characters and their traits.

That just one
thing was emblematic of my issue with the character differences and the way
that they're perceiving issues. Ok so now I've gone over my surface level
dislikes we are going to some spoiler territory
now so if despite what I've said you still really want to read this book then
I would suggest that you go away right now. Ok so for those of you who are
sufficiently put off or intrigued by the review we are going to go into some spoiler territory now. So if you've read the book or you know a
little about this book you'll know that one of the main themes and as
we go through is that of, potential trigger warning, rape, incest and paedophilia.

And that is paired with mental illness and the majority of the mental illness mentioned is DID, of dissociative identity disorder and borderline personality disorder or BPD.
There's also hints of psychosis added in there but in general it's just a
plethora of dissociative disorders. The portrayal of mental illness in the book
was absolutely appalling and that was what broke it to the point where I was
looking for other things that were going to piss me off too because that
happens sometimes when I get annoyed with something. I'll look for all the faults
because I may as well do this well. Mental illness was used in the book as a vehicle.

It wasn't used as any kind of health
condition. It wasn't used as an accompanying part of someone's life. Mental health was a plot device only in
this book. So we deal with characters who have many many multiple personalities who are used to further the plot.

They are picked up, they are adding new multiple personalities when the story's getting a bit slow and they just think maybe we could you know flesh it out with someone else
and they are completely disposable. As soon as that slow part of the storyline has
ended then they will just drop the character off. Essentially leading
the reader through these odd, sort of, dead end rabbit warrens of story line because
actually it's got no impact on any of plot whatsoever. The whole of this book
implies, and regardless of how the ending wraps up to some extent, implies that
mental illness is synonymous with violence and that is one of my biggest
bugbears and it doesn't need to be that way.

There are books do mental illness and
violence well. I read a lot of them. If you've been
here for a while then you know that that's kind of my thing is darker
literature, and often that does have elements of people who are unwell mixed
in. This wasn't that.

This was just them manipulating and
using multiple personalities as a plot device and using the experience of an abused person and the sort of issues with memory that they might have, specifically dissociation, as the premise for this really badly thought-out serial killer-ish plot. When they get to the point of the actual perpetrators the men and
neglient women who are allowing child abuse to go on throughout the novel they
completely and utterly glide over any of their history any of their mental history
whatsoever. It's only the people who have been
abused and raped for years who got a really nice examination
of how poor their mental health is. It irritates me so much because you know
there are people out there, and I've met people, I know an abnormal quantity of people
who have been abused as children who are absolutely fine and they don't go out and hurt anyone and this didn't have any
room for that really.

It was just that the image of the person who is mentally unwell, the image of the rape survivor as a broken individual. I can't stand
that. I just can't. People who are raped are whole people.

They aren't necessarily good
people they aren't necessarily strong people but they are whole people. They might be an
asshole. You can be an asshole and be abused. Perfectly possible.

But they are people and this wasn't portrayed as such. This was rape and abuse as the
sole defining factor of a character trait and thus the sole defining
factor of this novel. There is also a lesbian theme running through this book and actually I have less of an issue with this. I feel as though they were trying quite
hard to make it inclusive and to make it a bit different.

My issue is that it's a completely
stereotypical view of what lesbian relationship might look like. Even to the point where we have the tall, thin, elegant blonde and the petite, hard, very mannish brunette and that irritates me to some extent because
it's just so textbook. While I'm sure there are women out there who
have that kind of relationship, cookie cutter expectations of the
LGBT community I don't think are particularly helpful. I give
them some props because I think they were trying to do it well and I don't think they were just trying to go to the trope but it still irritated me.

I'm sorry. Whilst we are on LGBTQ it's worth
mentioning that the main motivation for these for these murders in the end
is transsexuality. So, you know, if you're going to look for issues in this book then maybe you'd find that as one. Through a
ridiculously complicated set of circumstances this individual decides that they are
going to change the gender for a reason other than that they are unhappy with their
gender identity, for other reasons, and is so angry that they changed their
gender identity and are unable to cope with it that they act out a sexual fashion
against those who have 'whole genders'.

Again not all that bad as a concept
I can imagine this might be done well potentially. It was done very poorly and it there was no explanation. I explained it
better, I think, just then they did in this entire book. It felt as though they
were just saying transsexuals are violent and transsexuals
are ill and I just got that pissed me off so much as well there's so much about this book that irritated me immensely.

We're going up to you the last point, it's by no means
the last issue I had with this book but I'm not going to go through every single
one of them because we don't have all day. That is the violence. So you guys know I read violent books. I
enjoyed, as much as one can, Lolita and American Psycho and I don't have an
issue with hard portrayals of childhood sexual abuse.

I read A Little Life and I actually
really enjoyed it. This however is what I would call masturbatory violence.
So there is no purpose, or rhyme or reason, to the violence, bar fulfilling the
author's own so the pleasure, by boosting the sales of
the book. There is no driver to the story line and no message behind it. It is just violence for violence's sake.

As the reader you're reading quite graphic
depictions of child sexual abuse and I. Would think it's going to be quite
triggering, it personally wasn't for myself my experience is slightly different to that,
but I imagine it could be quite triggering and again that was kind of somewhat relevant to the story, I don't think it was done well, I don't think it was written well but I can
pass on that to some extent. What they decided to do other than that was
just add in anything else they could that was horrific. So they were like 'do you know what the Holocaust has nothing to do with this story, let's put the Holocaust in there.

Or the Holodomor.' Yeah that's really relevant for a story that's happening in contemporary Stockholm. They packed it full of high-end violent
activities that happened and explained in this grotesque detail that you
can imagine. It's only shock value it doesn't have any underlying value at all. There's a line in here that I felt was oddly placed and because this isn't something that I would necessarily have said about the book otherwise but seeing as they've written themselves I feel
that I can bring it up.

They mentioned that individuals might be
writing things like thrillers in order to have an outlet for otherwise unhelpful
emotions and that said it just kind of raises that question. You know I'm not implying that the
authors are criminal in any way or necessary that they are suffering from these
things or having any kind of fantasies or whatever but I wonder why they put it
in the book because to me it sort of show, not that they have these these
issues, but there's really no reason for it. That the only reason they could
think to write such an awful thing would be that people have it in their heads. I imagine that this started as
somewhat a way to see how far they could push the thriller and the violence
and they did so without worrying about the craft of writing and about the enjoyment of the reader or anything like plot, character development any of those things.

So that
has been my rant. That's we've been the most irritated I
think I've been with a book on camera before and hopefully that has been of
some use to you. In summary I wouldn't buy the book and I
wouldn't recommend it to anyone. I have thought quite carefully, since having finished it, if there's a group of people I think
might enjoy this book.

To be honest, personally, I can't think of a group of
recommended it to. If you're still intrigued and it just sounds your cup of tea and then
please tell me what it is that you find interesting and if you have read it and
have enjoyed it I would love to hear your thoughts too. Because for me it was just so packed
full of issues I couldn't get, I couldn't get through to it. I couldn't get any enjoyment from the story at all.

I hope that you are well and that your reading hasn't irritated you quite as
much as The Crow Girl irritated me. I'll see you soon in my next video which
I think, fingers crossed, will be my July bookhaul. Bye bye..