Crow girl

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Cover image of the German edition Krähenmädchen

Crow girl (Swedish original title: Kråkflickan ) is a novel by the Swedish duo Erik Axl Sund , consisting of Jerker Eriksson and Håkan Axlander Sundquist . The thriller is the first volume of the special price (Specialpris) the Swedish Crime Academy excellent Victoria Miner trilogy, which was published in 2010 in Sweden and 2014 in Germany.

The novel, which is divided into numerous short chapters, ostensibly deals with the investigation of the multiple murders of abused children in Stockholm. At the center of the plot, however, is the protagonist Victoria Bergmann, who was sexually abused by her father as a child and thus developed a severe, multiple personality disorder. The novel was translated into numerous languages ​​and became an international bestseller, and the film rights were also sold to an American film company. The reviews usually compare the novel and the trilogy with the Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson and above all underline the tension and complexity of the novel, but at the same time they also question the extraordinary brutality of the novel's plot.

General and formal structure

The novel is divided into numerous unnumbered, sometimes very short chapters, which are headed with the respective locations of the plot. Exceptions are chapters that are headed “Back then” and give brief reviews of the past experiences of Victoria Bergmann and Sofia Zetterlund. The entire book is reproduced from the position of a narrator who has both insights into the concrete plot and into the thoughts of the people, their inner monologue . The story and the individual narrative threads themselves take place in the chronological order of the events from which the described retrospectives break out.

It has a dedication on the cover sheet that reads “In memory of a sister” and before the start of the plot is introduced by a quote from the Swedish Nobel Prize for Literature Harry Martinson from his work The nettles are in bloom :

A quote from the Swedish Nobel Prize for Literature, Harry Martinson (here on the left, with Ivar Lo-Johansson ) precedes the novel.

“Our life is dark. Great is our inborn disappointment - which is what causes so many fairy tales to bloom in Scandinavia's forests. The starvation burns darkly in our hearts. Many become watchers at the pile of their own hearts; put your ear to the sickness of your dreaminess and hear how your heart burns rustling. "

- Harry Martinson : The nettles are blooming

The storyline of the novel takes place mainly in Stockholm , where the police station, the practice of the psychologist Sofia Zetterlund as well as the apartments of the main characters and the locations of victims of a series of murders are located. The authors allude to numerous real historical events, such as the siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War and the civil war in Sierra Leone , in which individuals from the plot took part. The focus of the novel and the entire trilogy of novels is Victoria Bergmann, who was sexually abused by her father as a child and thus developed a severe personality disorder with schizophrenia .

The book Krähenmädchen is the first part of the Victoria Bergmann trilogy, which includes two more books: Scar Child (Original: Hungerelden (Victoria Bergmans svaghet, # 2); Sweden 2011, Germany 2014) and Schattenschrei (Original: Pythians anvisningar: [“ mord och psykoterapi "] (Victoria Bergmans svaghet, # 3); Sweden 2012, Germany 2014). The novel's title Crow Girl, a literal translation of the Swedish title Kråkflickan, refers to the self-name of the main character Victoria Bergmann, which she uses when she flees into her protective identity.

action

The core of the action in the crow girl is the investigation into a brutal series of murders of boys by the inspector Jeanette Kihlberg together with the psychologist Sofia Zetterlund. Side strands of the plot are the development of Victoria Bergmann, who trains the refugee boy Gao Lian to become a fighter in her apartment and gets him to kill other boys, as well as the personal development of Commissioner Kihlberg and her family and her beginning love affair with Sofia Zetterlund. Through the core plot, these strands are partially interwoven, but run largely parallel to the end of the novel.

The plot is interrupted by numerous reviews of past events in the lives of Victoria Bergmann and the psychologist Sofia Zetterlund, who at the end of the novel recognize each other as two separate personalities of the same person.

Solving the series of murders

At the beginning of the core plot of the child murders, the police officer Jeanette Kihlberg is called to the location of a mutilated child's corpse near the Thorildsplan subway station . Together with her colleagues and forensic doctor Ivo Andrić, she begins the investigation and begins to look for potential perpetrators. During the negotiations, Jeanette Kihlberg and her colleagues come across several suspicious men, some of whom have a criminal record for brutal sexual offenses. Among them are the former UN soldier Jimmie Furugård, Karl Lundström and Bengt Bergmann, against whom Kihlberg is investigating. In the meantime, the pathologist Andrić found parallels to dog fights in his investigations into the traces of abuse and had the corpse tested for sedatives. The lidocaine , which is common with dentists and is used as a local anesthetic, is found. A short time later , a second mutilated child's body was discovered on the island of Svartsjölandet , Ekerö , and identified as an immigrant and orphan Juri Krylov from Belarus. Like the first corpse of a child, he was mistreated by beatings before his death and neutered while still alive . Lidocaine is also found in his tissue. A third child's body, this time embalmed and also castrated, is finally to be found at Danvikstull .

At the same time, the psychologist Sofia Zetterlund, who specializes in the treatment of childhood trauma and abuse in children and adolescents, is running a successful practice in Stockholm. Among other things, she looks after the schizophrenic patient Victoria Bergmann, who was abused as a child. She also interviews perpetrators of abuse, such as Tyra Mäkelä, who was involved in the abuse and murder of her son, who had Fragile X syndrome , and the family man Karl Lundström, who abused his daughter Linnea for years. Sofia lives in a relationship with Mikael, but also mourns her former partner Lasse. She works particularly hard on the sound recordings of the sessions with Victoria Bergmann, during which she reports on events from her past and regularly changes her personalities. At about the same time as the murders, Sofia began her first sessions with the former child soldier Samual Bai, who, because of her knowledge of the Krio language , which was widely used in his home country, placed her trust and agreed to the treatment. During a session, Samual changes into an aggressive personality who attacks Sofia and chokes her instead of his normal personality (Samual Common) or the friendly, playful version (Frankly Samual).

The center of the police investigation is the imprisoned Karl Lundström, who belonged to a group of child molesters and who had access to the narcotic lidocaine through his wife, a dentist. Since Lundström was interviewed by Sofia Zetterlund, Jeanette contacts the psychologist to get more information. Later, Bengt Bergmann, Victoria Bergmann's father, also came into the focus of the investigating officers, and Commissioner Kihlberg contacted the daughter by telephone without knowing of her connection to Sofia Zetterlund. Jeanette meets with the psychologist and during the conversation the two women become friends - later a love affair develops between them. Karl Lundström, who remains the main suspect, hangs himself in his cell and can be saved at the last minute, but is in a coma. He can no longer be questioned and further investigations into other suspects come to nothing.

Shortly after the suicide attempt, the hung and mutilated body of Samual Bai is found in the attic of a house in the Monument district. Right-wing extremist Petter Christoffersson is arrested as a suspect , but he did not commit the crime. Andrić, the pathologist, draws parallels to the alleged suicide of Lasse, Sofia Zetterlund's former partner. Since Samual was also a patient of Sofia Zetterlund, Jeanette informs the psychologist and wants to confront her with the main suspect, which she avoids. Christoffersson gives the police a tip that Samual Bai is said to have accompanied a woman he already knew and for whom he had built an apartment. However, the police are not following up on either of these. The murder investigation is closed and Karl Lundström is considered the perpetrator of the child murders by the prosecution and the police chief. The murder of Samual is not investigated further.

Victoria Bergmann and Sofia Zetterlund

Another storyline traces the life of Victoria Bergmann: The novel begins with the description of her apartment, in which she has a room converted soundproof according to her wishes. She locks a boy in the room whom she met on a regional train and who has been drugged with morphine . Later it is shown how she forms the boy Gao Lian in her apartment and turns it into her tool, according to her interpretation of her body. Gao is raised by her to please her by inflicting pain and later to kill other children with her. Victoria herself prepares the killed boys for a corpse preservation and castrates them, then she and Gao Lian bring them to the later place where the corpses were found.

While the psychologist Sofia Zetterlund deals more and more with the supposedly recorded interviews with her patient Victoria Bergmann, she comes to the conviction that the psychological treatment makes little sense to her and wants to end it. As the story progresses, however, it becomes increasingly clear that both personalities - Victoria Bergmann and Sofia Zetterlund - are parts of the same person without knowing one another. After the incident with Samual Bai, after Zetterlund was reminded of her rape in Sierra Leone by child soldiers, and his visit to her apartment, the personality of Victoria Bergmann increasingly penetrated Sofia Zetterlund's consciousness. She understands that she and Victoria Bergmann are one person and can now also remember the abuse by her father and other incidents in her past in her personality as Sofia. Together with Gao Lian, she kills Samual Bai and takes him to the attic of right-wing radical Petter Christoffersson, where they disfigure him with acid.

Victoria Bergmann later decides to kill her parents in their house in Grisslinge. She sneaks into the house while her parents are in the sauna and first goes to her former nursery to get a box of mementos from her childhood and, most importantly, a video cassette with a film of her initiation rite in boarding school. Then she blocks the sauna door and sets fire to the house where her parents are burned. She later buries the urn with her parents' ashes in Stockholm's Skogskyrkogården cemetery .

Relationship development of Jeanette Kihlberg

Jeanette Kihlberg lives with her family in a house on Gamla Enskede. Her husband Åke is an unsuccessful artist who, in the course of the story, meets the gallery owner Alex, organizes the exhibitions for him and makes him known in the Swedish art scene. Jeanette and Åke have drifted apart, and until Åke's breakthrough, Jeanette was the sole breadwinner and the family suffered from a regular lack of money. The son Johan feels neglected especially by his busy mother, who has no more time for him and does not show up at events that are important to him, such as a football final.

After successfully exhibiting and selling some pictures, Åke starts a relationship with his gallery owner Alexandra Kowalska, and after a discussion the couple decides to separate. Jeanette Kihlberg turns increasingly to the psychologist Sofia Zetterlund, with whom she fell in love. At the end of the novel, she goes to the fair with Johan and Sofia so they can get to know each other. At the end of the novel, Sofia Zetterlund and Jeanette Kihlberg and their son Johan are in the amusement park Gröna Lund in Stockholm. Sofia goes to a ride with Johan, while Jeanette waits and tries to settle a fight. Sofia loses the boy in the ride and later collapses, telling incoherent fragments from the Uppsala fair. Johan remains missing (and is only found at the beginning of the second volume of the trilogy).

Retrospectives

In the novel there are several reviews by Victoria Bergmann and Sofia Zetterlund, which are usually headed with the chapter heading "Back then". These retrospectives are thematically integrated into the plot and portrayed from a narrative position, which, however, primarily reflects the thoughts and perceptions of the main character during these circumstances. In addition, there are spoken memories of Victoria, who Sofia listens to as a psychologist on the cassette player - but later she realizes that these are her own memories and the cassettes are actually empty.

Sierra Leone:
Sofia Zetterlund was a volunteer with Human Rights Watch and later as UNICEF's unofficial special envoy in Sierra Leone during the civil war . Above all, she observed the activities of the Revolutionary United Front , which were known for their brutal attacks and mutilations of the civilian population. She was injured during an assassination attempt in a camp in the city of Lakka and taken to a Red Cross camp. Due to her injury, a dislocated knee, she is not qualified for further use and should be brought to the Lungi International Airport by the pediatrician Marcus . On the way there they get stuck with their vehicle and are captured by a rebel group. They are taken to a camp where Sofia Zetterlund is raped and Marcus is killed. Sofia escapes and is later found by government troops.

Victoria's childhood memories:
Victoria Bergmann mainly remembers various events in which she was sexually abused by her father or other men, as well as her time at boarding school. The earliest portrayed memory is the trip to the holiday apartment in Dala-Floda, Dalarna, as a 10-year-old, where she has to orally satisfy her father . After a weekend together without assaults, he leaves Victoria alone for a week, but not without violating her again beforehand. During this vacation Victoria meets Martin's family, and they invite her to dinner. When Victoria arrives, she sees Martin's father bathing him and explaining that he pissed his pants - Sofia assumes that Martin is also being abused and runs home.

Boarding school and Roskilde:
During her time at the boarding school in Sigtuna , Victoria Bergmann and other newcomers are to be initiated by the older classmates, but notices the plans beforehand and identifies those responsible. Together with her she then plans the rite in which she and her classmates have to eat dog shit. Later she forces the mastermind to give her the video recording of the rite in order to have evidence against the older students and to be left alone by them.

Victoria befriends the other two girls, Hannah and Jessica, and travels with them after boarding school on an Interrail tour through Europe. She is raped in the tent at the Roskilde Festival

Lasse:
Lasse was Sofia Zetterlund's former lover. He was a businessman and had little time for Sofia, but on a winter vacation he responds to her wish for a child together and visits a partner swap club with her. Sofia later discovers that Lasse has already had himself sterilized and therefore cannot have children. She checks his cell phone, suspecting another affair, and after citing a business trip as a reason not to celebrate New Year's with her, she follows him and finds that he is already married and has grown children. In her disappointment, she kills Lasse, but makes it look like a suicide. Later she befriends his son Mikael and starts a relationship with him without him knowing anything about the background.

Uppsala fair:
After several summers together, Victoria Bergmann and Martin meet at the Uppsala fair, where they can spend some time without his parents. They ride the Ferris wheel together, in which Martin first gets scared and later has fun. Then they decide to go swimming to the nearby river, even though it is actually too cool. At the pier, Victoria loses sight of the boy, and his body is found in the river a day later. Because of the injuries, it is believed that he fell into the water and got caught in a ship's engine. Victoria is admitted to a hospital for surveillance, where she gets up at night and has a seizure that doctors rate as post-traumatic stress, psychosis, and paranoia.

In a later memory, Victoria / Sofia remembers what actually happened: While she was on the jetty with Martin and he refused to go into the cold water, she had a seizure in which she was overcome by the boy she was saw her father, felt threatened and killed him with a stone before thrusting him into the water. After the fact she couldn't remember it and looked for him desperately.

People and places of action

people

The most important characters in the plot of the novel are the police officer Jeanette Kihlberg as well as the psychologist Sofia Zetterlund and Victoria Bergmann. There are also numerous people from their personal environment, the Stockholm police and people who are directly or indirectly involved in the child murders:

  • Jeanette Kihlberg: Jeanette Kihlberg is a commissioner for the Stockholm police and is entrusted with investigating child murders in Stockholm. She is married to the artist Åke and lives with him and their son Johan in Gamla Enskede.
  • Sofia Zetterlund: Sofia Zetterlund is a psychologist in Stockholm who specializes in traumatic childhood memories. Among other things, she looks after perpetrators and victims of abuse cases, but also the former child soldier Samual Bai. Her patient Victoria Bergman turns out to be a hidden identity of her own person in the course of the novel.
  • Victoria Bergman: Victoria Bergman was regularly sexually abused as a child and adolescent by her father and later by other people. After an alleged accident in which her friend Martin died, she was treated in a mental hospital. Since the experience she has lived as Sofia Zetterlund in Stockholm, while the personality Victoria Bergman emerges as a second identity and commits cruel murders.
  • Martin: Martin is a childhood friend of Victoria Bergman, whom she met on a summer vacation and for whom she felt responsible. When they last met at the amusement park Gröna Lund , Martin was killed by Victoria in a fit.
  • Gao Lian: Gao Lian is an orphan boy from China who comes to Sweden as an illegal immigrant and, after breaking out of the reception camp, meets Victoria Bergmann on a train, who takes him with her and locks him at home in a specially furnished, soundproofed room . Here she trains him to be a fighter and lets him kill other children.
  • Åke and Johan: Åke is Jeanette Kihlberg's husband, Johan is their son. They live together in a house on Gamla Enskede. The artist Åke was unsuccessful for years until the gallery owner Alex helped him to achieve artistic success and the two began a relationship.
  • Bengt Bergman: Bengt Bergman is the father of Victoria Bergmann, married to her mother Brigitta. Victoria Bergmann was abused by her father as a young girl, while the mother deliberately looked away. At the end of the novel, she kills both parents in their house in Grisslinge.
  • Ivo Andrić: Ivo Andrić is a pathologist with the Stockholm Police and originally comes from Bosnia , where he worked as a doctor and forensic doctor during the siege of Sarajevo by troops of the Vojska Republike Srpske in the Bosnian War from 1992 to 1995. In addition to the physical abuse and mutilation of the victims, Andrić noted above all the use of the anesthetic lidocaine, which is common at dentists, to reduce pain in the victims.
  • Police officers Jens Hurtig, Dennis Billig, Schwarz, Åhlund, Kwist public prosecutor: These people are colleagues from Jeanette Kihlberg who are working with her on the child murder case. She mainly works with Jens Hurtig, while Schwarz and Åhlund are subordinate to her. The police chief Dennis Billig is her boss, but only deals peripherally with the case. Prosecutor von Kwist obstructs her investigation several times by forbidding her to question various suspects such as Karl Lundström or making it more difficult.
  • Lasse and Mikael: Lasse was Sofia Zetterlund's former boyfriend, but he was in a double relationship and had a family with two children next to her. Shortly after Sofia found this out, Lasse allegedly committed suicide - which, as the novel turns out, was staged by Sofia / Victoria. Mikael is Sofia's current partner and Lasse's son at the same time. He met Sofia shortly after his father's "suicide" and is unaware of her previous relationship with his father.
  • Samual Bai: Samual Bai is a youth who was active as a former child soldier of the Revolutionary United Front in the civil war in Sierra Leone and who has a split personality as a result of the resulting trauma. He is being treated by Sofia Zetterlund, where he changes personalities depending on their conversation and attacks her during a meeting. When he shows up after a robbery on a money truck, memories of her experiences and rapes in Sierra Leone erupt and her identity as Victoria Bergmann emerges. She drugged him and had Gao Lian kill him, and they brought the body to the house of right-wing radical Petter Christoffersson.
  • Karl Lundström: Karl Lundström is a successful construction manager and lives with his wife Annette. Lundström abused his daughter Linnea for years and belongs to a group of child molesters who exchange child pornography with one another . He was arrested and placed in the Hunninge Hospital psychiatric clinic. In the course of the trial he made a suicide attempt, which he barely survived and after which he was in a coma. Due to parallels between his case and that of the murdered children, he is portrayed by Jeanette's boss as the perpetrator for the murders, but his condition does not allow a trial.
  • Petter Christoffersson: Petter Christoffersson is a right-wing radical in whose house the burned body of Samual Bai is found. He was at the same time one of the construction workers who carried out the expansion of the soundproof room at Sofia Zetterlund's and described that he saw Samual with the woman shortly before his murder. The story is only partially believed.

places

The novel Krähenmädchen is set primarily in the Swedish capital Stockholm and its surroundings, only individual reviews focus on other locations. The main places of action are:

  • Gamla Enskede: In Gamla Enskede , the old town of Enskede, is the apartment of Commissioner Jeanette Kihlberg and her family, consisting of her husband Åke and their son Johan. Jeanette only retires to the apartment after work. Åke runs his studio here and is also responsible for the household. As a planned garden city, Gamla Enskede is characterized by single-family houses.
  • Kronoberg: Kronoberg is a police building and remand prison on the island of Kungsholmen in Stockholm. Jeanette Kihlberg and her colleagues work in this building.
  • Vita bergen: Victoria Bergmann / Sofia Zetterlund's apartment is located at Vita bergen, a city park in the Södermalm district . She is also holding Gao Lian prisoner in the apartment.
  • Tvålpalatset: The Tvålpalatset, also known as Monténska huset, is a historic building on Sankt Paulsgatan in Stockholm that is used as an office complex. The psychologist Sofia Zetterlund has her office in this building.
  • Hospital Huddinge: The psychiatric hospital in Huddinge is the place of accommodation for the sex offender Karl Lundström, where he will be interviewed by the psychologist Sofia Zetterlund to his deeds.
  • Monument district: In the Monument district on Södermalm is the apartment of Mikael, Sofia Zetterlund's partner, and the apartment of right-wing radical Petter Christoffersson, in whose attic the mutilated body of Samual Bai is found.
  • Thorildsplan: The Thorildsplan is a small park with a subway station in the Kristineberg residential area, which is characterized by high-rise housing estates . The first child's body is found in the area of ​​the subway entrance.
  • Svartsjölandet: The second child's body, a boy from Belarus, is discovered on the island of Svartsjölandet , Ekerö .
  • Grisslinge: The parental home of Victoria Bergmann is in the village of Grisslinge on the island of Värmdö , Värmdö municipality . She grew up in this house and her parents continued to live there until they were killed in the house that Victoria set on fire.
  • Dala-Floda, Dalarna: In Dala-Floda, a small town in Dalarna County, there is the Bergmann holiday home where Victoria Bergmann and her father spent the summer. In a summer in which he left her alone for a week, Victoria meets Martin and his family here and befriends the boy, whom she wants to protect from his father based on her own experiences.
  • Uppsala Fair: In Victoria Bergmann's reflection on the past, the Uppsala Fair was where she last met Martin. They rode the Ferris wheel together and then went to the bank of the nearby river, where Victoria killed her friend.
  • Skogskyrkogården: Victoria Bergmann buries the remains of her parents after the fire in her house alone in Stockholm's Skogskyrkogården cemetery .
  • Amusement park Grona Lund: In the amusement park Grona Lund the novel ends. Here Sofia Zetterlund loses Jeanette Kihlberg's son.

reception

The Victoria Bergmann Trilogy was awarded the Specialpris of the Swedish Crime Academy in 2012. The books have been translated internationally and have become bestsellers in various countries, including Germany . According to the official website of the author duo and the website of the Swedish promotion agency Salomonsson Agency , the publishing rights for the novels have been sold to almost 40 international publishers. In some of these countries the books are already out, in others they will be out in the next months or years.

Carl Larsson : In the Little Girls' Bedroom (excerpt from the Swedish book cover, 1897)

The Swedish writer Jean Bolinder described the trilogy in Dast Magazine as an "insidiously dazzling masterpiece". It forces the reader to rush breathlessly through the pages of the book. He points out that the novels are not cozy detective stories, but rather a terrifying and confusing story. It plays in the Jungian collective unconscious and thus in "all of us inside". Readers identified with both the “child within us” and his indictment against the whole world, and with their adult self against whom the indictment was directed. At the same time, Bolinder refers to the painting In the Bedroom of the Little Girls by the painter Carl Larsson , which was used and alienated as the cover image for the first volume of the Swedish original edition. A mask was placed on the cover of the naked girl depicted there, otherwise almost nothing was changed in the picture. Bolinder does not assume that Larsson has any bad intentions in the picture and assumes that he loved his children and wanted to show in the picture how cute they are; at the same time, however, he can imagine how terrible the picture was for the young girl as she got older and the picture became known worldwide and accessible to many pedophiles.

Reception in Germany

Erik Axl Sund (2014, press picture)

In Germany, the three German translations were published by Goldmann Verlag in 2014 every few months . The translations are by the translator Wibke Kuhn , who also translated the Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson, directly referred to in the Crow Girl , and other bestsellers from Swedish. Immediately after its publication, the first volume Krähenmädchen made it into the top 10 of the Spiegel bestseller list in the paperback / fiction category and rose to number 2 on August 11, 2014, where it remained for several weeks. Scars child reached on 29 September 2014 even after a few weeks Rank 1 in the list and SchattenSchrei rose on November 24, 2014 after the appearance on the top position. All three volumes had been in the top 10 of the list for several weeks.

The crow girl was also discussed in numerous media in Germany, partly as part of a presentation of the entire trilogy. In the mass media in particular, the directness and brutality of the presentation were given priority. The BILD newspaper had the pithy headline “YOU write stuff that our nightmares are made of” and introduced the trilogy with a detailed interview and Elmar Krekeler, deputy head of the features section for Die Welt , headlined “This is the most terrible thriller of the year . ”He describes the“ novel about child abuse ”as“ pornographic ”and at the same time as“ the next big crime thriller from Sweden ”, directly followed by“ actually a real scandal ”. Then he describes the trilogy as "blood soup of unprecedented proportions" and as the product of two angry former punk rockers with a book, "which Stieg Larsson and actually all Scandinavian horror-and-horror specialists make look like tender orphan boys", before moving on to clear Words reflect the content of the book. According to his portrayal, Crow Girl is a "hysterical novel" that screams at the reader and torments good taste and his conclusion is that the "allegedly socially critical crime literature that is increasingly developing into a pornographic trade in a scandalous violent competition" leads to a moral psychosis . He concludes: “You don't drive child abuse out by abusing abused children again in literary terms.” According to BILD, the Swedish duo of authors “provides stuff that nightmares are made of” and writes “terrifyingly ingenious novels that keep the blood in your veins let freeze ”.

The Frankfurter Neue Presse introduces its interview with the authors less drastically . According to this interview, the trigger for the story was the fact that 1,500 children disappear from refugee homes in Sweden every year. According to her, they wanted to “write about things that scare us” and not do “normal, cute crime stories”. At the same time, the novel should take a look “behind the facade of Stockholm”, which “seduces its visitors with a perfect postcard idyll”, although there is “more and more poverty” due to high real estate prices that are unaffordable for normal earners.

In the review of the Hessischer Rundfunk program hr1 , Krähenmädchen was presented as an audio book tip. The reviewer compares the book with works by Stieg Larsson or Jussi Adler-Olsen . According to his portrayal, the duo of authors “causes a sensation, because the first part of a trilogy depicts acts of violence against children in an absolutely drastic way.” He describes the novel as “peppered with psycho-ill tormenting fantasies ”and based on this asks:“ Do thrillers really have to become more and more brutal? Do so many mentally ill and notorious tormentors have to come together in such a compact space? ”In his opinion, the authors want to“ denounce violence against children by depicting violence against children as drastically as possible ”and must“ put up with the criticism that they are involved in overshoot their meticulous descriptions far beyond their target. ”In the next sentence, however, he certifies the novel again to be“ the most exciting thriller of this summer ”.

Reception in other countries and filming

In the United States, the trilogy is not due to appear until spring 2016; the rights here are held by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., a publisher belonging to Penguin Random House .

The great international success of the trilogy meant that the story was also interesting for a film adaptation. Even before the books were published in the United States, secured the Tomorrow studios of Marty Adelstein together with the ITV Studios the film rights to the books and published plans, the story as a television series to film. Adelstein Becky Clements as President of Tomorrow Studios and director Michael London will be responsible for the production and direction .

Publications

The original book Crow Girl was published in Swedish in 2010 and has since been translated into numerous languages. For the sake of clarity, only the German editions are listed alongside the Swedish original:

Original edition:

German editions:

Web links

supporting documents

  1. ↑ Portrait of the author at Goldmann Verlag, accessed on January 16, 2015.
  2. ↑ Erik Axl Sund in an interview on the website of the Random House publishing group , accessed on January 16, 2015.
  3. ↑ Crow Girl # 1 on the Salomonsson Agency website , accessed February 28, 2015.
  4. ↑ a b Crow Girl # 1 on the official website of the author duo Erik Axl Sund, accessed on February 28, 2015.
  5. ↑ a b c Jean Bolinder: Trilogin om Victoria Bergmans svaghet: KRÅKFLICKAN, HUNGERELDEN, PYTHIANS ANVISNINGAR. Review in Dast Magazine, October 2, 2012; Accessed March 3, 2015.
  6. ↑ Krähenmädchen ( Memento of the original from February 5, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.buchreport.de archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at book report .
  7. ↑ Scar Child ( Memento of the original from February 5, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.buchreport.de archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at book report .
  8. ↑ Schattenschrei ( Memento of the original from February 5, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.buchreport.de archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at book report .
  9. ↑ a b Eileen Primus: YOU write stuff that our nightmares are made of. Review on bild.de, September 14, 2014, accessed on February 16, 2015.
  10. ↑ a b c d Elmar Krekeler: This is the most terrifying thriller of the year. Review in the features section on Welt.de, August 1, 2014, accessed on February 16, 2015.
  11. ^ A b Günter Keil, Andrea Tholl: "Stockholm is a tough city". ( Memento of the original from April 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.fnp.de archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Interview with Jerker Eriksson and Håkan Axlander Sundquist in Frankfurter Neue Presse , August 20, 2014, accessed on February 16, 2015.
  12. ↑ a b c hr1 audio book tip Erik Axl Sund: “Krähenmädchen” on hr-online.de, August 6, 2014, accessed on February 16, 2015.
  13. ↑ a b Nellie Andreeva: “The Crow Girl Book” Trilogy Optioned by Tomorrow Studios for TV Series, deadline.com, December 9, 2014, accessed February 28, 2015.