Overall, I suspect that there are more horrors in the feel good ” literature than anywhere else in the literature, even if the horrors are the starting point for very many books. They are found in Dickens’s novels, Harry Potter, and Tara Westovers newly published autobiography, ”All I had to learn”, where she tells about her childhood in an extremely dysfunctional american family.

is almost always built after the pattern: someone living in terrible misery as tiggarpojke on the streets of London, in the closet under the stairs or with parents who refuse all contact with society. It begins with the main character living a terrible life with terrible hardship, it is quite hopeless. Or no, wait… and then it happens something. Whereupon a new world opens up, you will come to a trollkarlsskola or a rich, loving relative, or why not a university in Oxford.

the worse The misery has been in the beginning, the greater will be the liberation, when the protagonist manages to get out of it.

It is a proven sagostruktur, as a ”Cinderella” about. But it is not unrealistic. The world is full of alternatives, of other ways to live. It is one of literature’s most underrated advantages that it manages to expand our horizons and show us the possibility to live a different life.

Strangely enough, it is more unbelievable when it happens in reality. Tara Westover had meant to write his book as a novel, but came to the conclusion that it had not been made credible. Myself, I’m wondering still how the heck she, after a constricted, isolated upbringing managed to see the opportunity to do something else. It sounded too much like a fairy tale.

usually still prince charming to be a condition, but he wears no longer the sole responsibility of the protagonist’s life to be happy. Instead is the feel good books are more about friendship and being part of a larger community.

Önskedrömmarna has changed in character. Irish Maeve Binchy put it best. She said she wrote about the ugly ducklings, but they never grew up to become swans.

However, they became very skilled ducks.

***

Translation: Cecilia Falk, Printz publishing

Typical Nora Stuart is a medical doctor, for feel good books tend to take place in the right affluent environments and sjukhusromantik is a private romantic genre. I am thinking suspiciously. But Nora Stuart will be immediately hit by a saneringsbil in Boston and leave the world of health care (and his partner, the surgeon, as fast as she can.

She goes home to the barren little island off of Maine where she grew up. And not only the island is barren, her mother seems to invest wholeheartedly in that view the family as little love as possible. She cooks bleak, tasteless food and spend rather than their care for an uncharacteristically sinister budgie. The father is missing since a long time, the teenage systerdottern is openly rude and the sister is not even there. She is sitting in jail on the other side of the united states.

on the högreståndsliv that is so common in populärlitteraturen, where many happen to have been born in wealthy families or have drullat of an exceptionally successful business concept: they can not live like normal people sometime, please? A bit tawdry failures would bring so much credibility. And yes, it is precisely so with the ”Home to Scupper Iceland”. Were it not for the happily outrageous humor, it would be a terrible depiction of a dysfunctional family.

Or, for that matter, a dysfunctional island. The old conflicts will be as new when Nora comes home, and she gets plenty of reasons to think about their high school time. Usually she would otherwise not want to think about, it ended not good. There are many who look askance at her.

Kristan Higgins writes with an indomitable energy, surprisingly drastic formulations and the kind of perverse humor that makes you have a lump in my throat before starting to laugh. Yes, it mostly goes to the woods all the time and sometimes, people are awful. But there are enough other things in life that compensates for the disaster.

Translation: Lisa Marques Jagemark, Sekwa

do you Usually take a look at what people are reading on the subway? I do always (most fun when you just see the content, and try to guess which book it is), and it also makes Juliette in Paris. When she is on the way to his boring mäklarjobb (no any romanticism here, not, mäklaryrket described as truly individual and stylish) she looks at the readers around: the man who is reading a thick book about insects, on the woman who read kärleksromaner and always start to cry on page 247.

It is the books which is the center of juliette’s quite a lonely life, so it is clear that one day she goes into a port that is set slightly ajar with the help of a book (some books father very badly in this book). Where the hidden book smuggler Soliman and his daughter, Zaïde, and juliette’s life change.

Charming bokromantik straight through, with persistent references to a number of classics.

Translation: Lisbet Holst, Forum

It is never wrong to have a british goods as the basis for a romantic story: the environments are so beautiful that the story almost comes in second hand. This is called the goods Cloudesley and have become old and dilapidated, but Lillian Muir has lived there since she married a long time ago, and want to stay here until she dies. Her husband is dead, the son will only on sporadic visits and granddaughter Maggie has lived in Australia the past year after a relationship that ended with a betrayal.

It is Lillian who raised her grandchild, and she has always managed to hide some crucial facts about his life for Maggie, it turns out. When Maggie comes home and takes over the responsibility, she needs to re-evaluate much of what she believed in, and understanding of what Lillian has refrained from doing that, she is also forced to think about their own choices. Wistful about what to choose and what affects one but you choose.

Translation: Maria Store, Printz publishing

Laura Griffin has lived for her family, she has been a successful housewife (yes, they still exist) who have taken care of their daughters until they are now moving away from home. Whereupon life becomes incomprehensible plot, and the husband is shown not to directly be any support in life. On the contrary, actually.

Thus, the Laura Griffin start, and it would have been a little bit well sockersött (especially as it is about sylt) about how women working in the home can be converted into successful business. But Veronica Henry writes fine on the old receptsamlingen which is the hub of family history, with different handwritings from different times and recipes that are changed, built upon and evolve with the generations.

She also manages to, very mildly, to convey the realization that it is madness to trust the husband to take care of everything financially.

Translation: Helena Johansson, Harper Collins

Predictable, of course, and told a thousand times before – but yet it is irresistibly entertaining. Mhairi McFarlane tells us a little in the same tone as Helen fielding’s books about Bridget Jones. Georgina is in her thirties, working in a grimy restaurant in Sheffield and, along with Robin, a småkändis with more ego than talent.

It is of course not so good. And not getting the better of the family see her as a total failure.

So she gets a job at a newly renovated pub, where one of the owners turns out to be her childhood sweetheart Lucas. Sure you understand how it should go, and the romance is pretty boring. The good thing is how she tells about the life of a helpless trettioåring living the same as when she was twenty and still waiting for life to begin.

Read more book recommendations from Lotta Olsson