I did learn there could be allergy cars on Finnish trains, which would be awesome, but after how confusing this was, I’m not sure that’s real.

7. Norma – Sofi Oksanen

After reading this I can’t really say I learned much about Norma with the supernatural hair. She can tell if people are sick and tell emotions and her hair reacts to those and for some reason doesn’t protect her from Alvar, who is part of a human trafficking ring which provides babies that is also a hair import business except that Norma’s mom was passing off Norma’s hair as Ukranian hair. Somehow, he’s not bad, but Norma’s also been smoking her hair and there are several other characters who are either on the definitely bad side of the providing babies ring and then Marion, Norma’s mom’s partner in trying to get out of crime through hair, who thinks Norma’s mom was killed. And some family history of the hair and a ghost, sort of, who has tormented some of the women in the family, and I am still not really sure what I was supposed to be getting from this story exactly. It didn’t feel like a mystery or a slice of life or like there was any resolution to anything. The pacing of how information was distributed was both slow and apparently too quick, as at the end Norma was saying she understood her mother’s business with her hair and whatever else she was doing and my thought was, I don’t though. To be fair, there are things to be said about the commodification of women’s bodies, lots of them, but I’m not entirely sure what was being said here in Norma exactly.

 

No one will be smoking or selling Danger Crumples’ hair. Not ghost Danger Crumples’ hair either.