The hardest thing there is, is to write the talented vardagsskildringar for children. It will be easy far too pale, as if everyday life and childhood was just something that was going on in anticipation of better times. In the best cases, it might be a bit funny now and then.
Kerstin has guldhår and lives in a village next door with a bästisen Fatima, everyday life, and, above all, the freedom of the deck, body. It shimmers even in the pictures, despite the fact that Katarina Strömgårds fine illustrations are strictly black and white, she manages to bring out a sense of autumn colors, and, of course, the black höstmörker that frames the little village on the evening.
But in the beginning shimmers it is not at all, for the story begins with Kerstin gets angry when she has to draw self-portraits in the school and has been bored on the afternoons together with Fatima, who always want to play but they never do anything fun.
It is not so easy, it there with the friendship. It is so good when two girls live so close to each other in the back country, clear to the parents like when they are playing. Which children accept when they are very small, but quite soon as opposed to. It is not all the people you want to hang out with.
with a strange, oformulerad feeling in the pit of my stomach as most of you have been with for sometime: when you are unhappy in a friendship, but not even really understand that it is about unhappiness. It has become a matter of course for Fatima to every morning to ask kerstin’s dad about Kerstin can play with her in the afternoon. No one asks Kerstin, for all the think they know what Kerstin thinks.
Kerstin ducking away when she can, and she has her own games. She collects guldsaker, the kind of thing that has the same color as her hair, and one day o, one day, she finds a extrafin guldsak as she hides in a place that only she knows.
The show, of course, lead to problems. It is also moving into a new family in the village, in the derelict house Settlement, and changes both the mood and good manners.
fine with Kerstin” take in stride from vardagsskildring to something out of the ordinary, for Kerstin and her new friend can play for real. All that has made it feel like the man can head out on a completely unpredictable treasure hunt which gets its form along the way: two green pieces of plastic becomes a clue, a rusty wire another. Everything is going to interpret, the imagination leads the children to place after place, one idea brings another.
Rarely have I read a book that so well describes a childhood with a boundless, magical lekvärld. It is a modern Bullerbyvärld reminiscent of Frida Nilsson’s books about Hedvig, but a bit more serious and with more conflict. Kerstin’s awkward feelings large space and she does not always right. But she is more human than most of the books, and thankfully, the two books about her.
Read more texts and reviews by Lotta Olsson here.
