The epigraph to this story is a quotation from the author of The Good Soldier Švejk.

In a vacuum, I think this book is a low-middling seven. Nothing about it is bad, but some the characters are frustrating in ways that don't quite make sense narratively.

The story revolves around four children:

• Bård
• Bergljot (the narrating daughter)
• Åsa
• Astrid

as they (elder two) try to navigate estrangement and an inheritance dispute that arises when the younger two daughters seem to conspire with the mother to cut the elder two out of the significant portion of the Will which takes the form of two cabins representing the most significant and sentimental portion of the family's estate.

Bergljot proves to be, not an unreliable narrator per se, but one who anxiously processes emotions out of order. In this sense, reading this book is like pealing back layers of an onion as we skip around chronologically to various punctuate points in her life which explain her complicated emotions towards her siblings.

This processing emotions out of order mirrors the symptomatic behavior of someone with PTSD, for example Bergljot begins grieving over an alternate scenario wherein her father survived his fall, but lives paralyzed. In this fantasy (for that's what it is, even if a nightmarish one for her), she has to either continue to live disappointed in him, or herself – and she begins to experience grief commensurate with either outcome after learning the news that he's already died and neither outcome is even possible.

See also: the repetition of phrases used in dialog, used again in her internal narration e.g.

"Dad always said that we would have to carry him out with his shoes on"

and that's what happened, they had to carry him out with his shoes on.

But repeated over and over again. As the traumatic clang reaches a climax, it's almost like we're reading the book with our eyes crossed for so many of the passages are duplicated in the narration (not tediously so, but certainly feverishly). It contributes masterfully to this growing sense of terror. The novel is certainly a Freudian procedure in family drama and trauma.

--spoilers?--

The book is rocketed out of the 7/10 bracket northward upon realization that this is not just a work of fiction, but almost certainly autobiographical to some extent. The troubling, stilted characters become a lot more understandable – those people did those things those wonky ways because that's how it went down in real life.

The book has a non-trivial "Reception" section on Wikipedia explaining how, despite the fact that the Hjorth family put on a cheerful and congratulatory air when Vigdis' book was in the limelight, denied any similarities between fictitious characters and their family,

Hjorth's sister Helga Hjorth wrote her own novel in response, titled Free Will, in 2017. The response novel tells the story of a woman surprised to find that her sister had written a fictional book inspired by familial conflict in which her character hides alleged incest.

oh yeah and it all starts making sense. Some of the lines from the novel, like:

Mom would rather that I be admitted to a psychiatric ward than become a writer

now read like a lead punch, and it is really good in a dark way.

It's comiong at the same subject as Girl on a Train, but from the subject of the victim instead of the perpetrator. This book does everything that that book was trying to do and it does so without being cringe. This book fucking stings, and that book seemed irrelevant.

I'm pretty sure that Clara doesn't exist/is made up by Bergljot as a mechanism for processing the loss (not so much the actual death, but the loss) of her own father. In abusing her, he effectively kills himself, and Bergljot processes this loss through the maybe-made-up friend who is still reeling from her father's suicide.

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