Today it’s my turn on the blog tour for Toxic. My review is written with thanks to Anne Cater for inviting me on the tour and to Orenda Books for my copy of the book.

Blurb:

When Mathilde is forced to leave her teaching job in Oslo after her relationship with eighteen-year-old Jacob is exposed, she flees to the countryside for a more authentic life.

Her new home is a quiet cottage on the outskirts of a dairy farm run by Andres and Johs, whose hobbies include playing the fiddle and telling folktales – many of them about female rebellion and disobedience, and seeking justice, whatever it takes.

But beneath the apparently friendly and peaceful pastoral surface of life on the farm, something darker and more sinister starts to vibrate and, with Mathilde’s arrival, cracks start appearing … everywhere.

Review:

Helga Flatland is an absolutely brilliant wordsmith and this shines through Toxic from the very first paragraph. She writes about some very complex emotions and does so with such  intelligence and clarity that is impossible not to become tangled in the complicated lives of the characters. 

The novel is written from two different perspectives – Johs and Mathilde – which are separated using different fonts. I was interested to see how their stories would come together and what would happen when they met. I must admit that I didn’t find the characters particularly likeable, and Mathilde especially seems immature and manipulative. However, this doesn’t matter as they are created in so much detail that I could still become invested in their stories.

Toxic is quite slow paced, so it’s not the style of book I would normally read, but there is so much going on under the surface that I still found it compelling, especially in the second half as the stories merged. The atmosphere is definitely toxic and Helga Flatland creates this brilliantly, building it up as the novel progresses. The novel is set during the pandemic, when social isolation measures were at their strictest, and this increases the sense of unease between the characters and the sense of foreboding I felt as I read.

Toxic is available from Amazon.

You can follow the rest of the blog tour here: