Norma by Sofi Oksanen

I'm not really sure if I enjoyed this book or not to be perfectly honest.  It is a strange amalgam of crime thriller and supernatural and I am not sure it really works as well as it could.  There is just something missing in the characterisation with everyone from the eponymous Norma to the peripheral characters such as the challenged Helena.  This did start off as 3 Stars but the more I think about it the more I realise that that is probably over-egging the pudding.

The book starts with the suicide of Norma's mother and then slowly unfolds through the funeral where she meets the thoroughly unlikeable Max Lambert.  Norma has "issues" with her hair, it can sense things about people and it is telling her that this man is bad news.  So, she rushes home and cuts her hair and then begins to worry about the downsizing at her workplace.  Really, other than her hair and her cornucopia of medicines there is nothing really interesting in the main character and you never really feel you are getting to know her.

Much of the book deals with the selling of hair and baby farming, apparently being good at sourcing clients and donors for the one makes you adept at doing it for the other.  However, the criminality is dealt with in such a superficial way that you get no genuine sense of menace from Alla or Lambert and his Dogs.  Apparently Marion is terrified of them, particularly her step-mother and father, but the feeling never gets further off the page than the typeface.

The most intriguing bits are undoubtedly the extracts from the Videos left to Norma by her mother.  Here we get to finally meet the incarcerated Helena and we start to unravel the heredity of Norma's hair.  A family member, Eva, had just the same fast-growing, autonomous hair but she ran away to be a Photographer's muse in the 1920s leaving behind her husband and children (one of whom just happens to be Norma's grandmother).  Now Eva seems to be speaking through Helena and urging Anita into selling Norma's hair and exposing the Lambert's dealings.  Apparently Eva is now trying to communicate with Norma too.

A disappointing book that could have been so much more if it wasn't trying so hard to be different, or clever or maybe even statement making.  It actually makes me a little mad at the opportunities that I perceive to have been missed here.

I RECEIVED A FREE COPY OF THIS BOOK FROM READERS FIRST IN EXCHANGE FOR AN HONEST REVIEW.

**Review originally published October 31st, 2017**