Review - Little Star, John Ajvide Lindqvist

[Karen from AustCrime]

Book Title:   LITTLE STAR
Author:  John Ajvide Lindqvist
ISBN:   9781921758577
Location:   Sweden
Publisher:   Text Publishing
Year of Publication:   2011

Lennart Cederström, embittered ex-pop singer, is foraging for mushrooms when he finds a baby left for dead in a plastic bag. He revives her and is utterly astonished by the sound of her crying: the child’s voice is a clear, haunting, perfectly pitched note.

Lennart decides the girl will be his project. Raised in isolation, untainted by the dross and banality of the everyday, she will become the vehicle for a pure, exquisite music. He installs the baby in the basement and threatens to kill his downtrodden wife if she breathes a word. But their delinquent son Jerry is a harder case and his ideas for the infant prodigy, whom he names Theres, involve talent shows, celebrity and enormous success.

Meanwhile the child is growing up and developing a few ideas of her own. Only hers involve a hammer. A hammer, and a very strong taste for violence and a strange ambition to appear on Swedish Idol.

Imagine what will happen when she finds a friend who shares her interests.

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