Review: As Black as Ebony by Salla Simukka

Publication Date: August 4^th 2015
Publisher: SkyScape/Amazon Publishing (Published in the UK by Hot Key Books)
Length: 151 pages

Huge thanks to Netgalley and SkyScape/Amazon Publishing for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review

After a harrowing summer in Prague, Lumikki Andersson is back in Finland at her prestigious art school, concentrating on graduation. She lands the lead role in the school’s modern-day adaptation of “Snow White” and finds herself facing a new distraction—Sampsa, the boy playing the role of the huntsman, who has an undeniable allure that makes Lumikki conflicted about what, and who, she wants.
As Lumikki starts falling into something more than just her role on stage, a shadow is cast over the production when she begins receiving creepily obsessive love notes. Lumikki can’t ignore the increasingly hostile tone of her admirer’s messages, and when the stalker threatens mass violence at the play’s premiere, Lumikki knows she must discover who is behind the menace and stop the person at all costs.
With a foe who has a heart as black as ebony, does Lumikki have any hope of saving those she loves?

It’s a well-known fact that I absolutely loved the first book in this trilogy ‘As Red As Blood’. It was terrifying, engrossing, tense and brilliantly paced – the sort of book that you had to read in one nail biting sitting or risk losing your mind. Then I stormed straight through the second book, and whilst it didn’t pull me in in quite the same way as the first, it was filled with Simukka’s trade mark brevity and twisting plot threads and was still a fantastic read. So I was curious as to how the third book in the trilogy would finish Lumikki’s story off, and whether it would lean more towards the brilliance of the first book or continue in the same vein as the second.

Actually it ended up being somewhere in the middle. It had all of the terror and tension of the first book, but it felt a little too short, as though the climax happened far too soon, just as everything was building up nicely.

However, there was a lot that really worked well in this finale. The translation was much smoother for this book. All three books are set in Finland and the original language is Finnish, so the translation into English has been a little shaky at times in the first two books. There are still a couple of odd moments, but on the whole the overall feeling is a much smoother and more dynamic narrative that feels closer to how the original was written.

Simukka’s writing style is refreshing to read. She has a way with words, and a sparseness to her prose which cut the book down to the absolute minimum of fuss – like Lumikki herself. It draws you into the story and delivers emotional blows and reveals hidden depths that wouldn’t have been possible with a more verbose and flowery narrative. It’s sparse, and it works beautifully.

This book was also a lot more focussed, which definitely helped to hone the narrative. Whilst the first and second book had several interlocking narratives, with same narrators known to the reader and others hidden until the end, this book simply offered Lumikki’s and her unknown stalker. It meant that the story was a lot less confusing and we’re less distracted by being confused about different narrators who we’re unsure about.

My biggest problem was the length. All three books have been very short, but this is by far the shortest and as a result you get a wonderful build up but then a very sudden climax. ‘Hey look, here’s the stalker, and now they’ve been defeated, everyone go home.’ It just felt very abrupt, I wanted more. There had been such a deliciously terrifying build up, it just felt too sudden and out of the blue that it all came together and was resolved so quickly.

However despite that draw back, the book is still a fantastic read and a very satisfying conclusion to the series. You could easily read ‘As Red as Blood’ as a standalone book, but I have loved coming back to Lumikki over the course of the following two books and slowly unpacking her story and watching her piece herself and her life together. If you’re looking for a fast paced thriller, these are the books for you. Or if you fancy trying a YA book that breaks the trends and is set in Finland and translated into English then I recommend this even more. It was so refreshing to read something so wildly different from the usual YA fare, and this offered a more than satisfying conclusion.

Review: As White As Snow by Salla Simukka

Publication Date: 3rd March 2015
Publisher: Skyscape
Length: 224 pages

Huge thanks to Netgalley for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review

The heat of the summer sun bakes the streets of Prague, but Lumikki’s heart is frozen solid.
Looking to escape the notoriety caused by the part she played in taking down Polar Bear’s crime ring, seventeen-year-old Lumikki Andersson escapes to Prague, where she hopes to find a few weeks of peace among the hordes of tourists. But not long after arriving, she’s cornered by a skittish and strange young woman who claims to be her long-lost sister. The woman, Lenka, is obviously terrified, and even though Lumikki doesn’t believe her story—although parts of it ring true—she can’t just walk away.
Lumikki quickly gets caught up in Lenka’s sad and mysterious world, uncovering pieces of a mystery that take her from the belly of a poisonous cult to the highest echelons of corporate power. On the run for her life again, Lumikki must use all her wits to survive, but in the end, she just may discover she can’t do it all alone.

After the tense and fast paced ride of the first book in the trilogy ‘As Red As Blood’ I was very eager to get straight back into Lumikki’s world and this time to explore Prague with her. Unfortunately this book didn’t grab me in the same way as the first.

The story wasn’t as engaging this time, it took much longer to really get into the story and by that point we were reaching the climax and there wasn’t enough time to properly invest. I’m not really sure what it was about it that didn’t work. A combination of pacing, slow plot and characters. It followed the same formula as the first, with characters being introduced slowly, first with no names, and then later with names and motives. But instead of building the suspense like it did in the first book it dragged it out and left the plot barely moving for most of the book.

This instalment also suffered from problems in translation. The writing is very clunky and awkward, much more so than in the first book, which was frustrating as it felt as though that was not how it would have read originally. It’s almost enough to make me want to learn Finnish so I can read it as it was intended!

However, these frustrations aside this was still a very good book. I loved Lumikki, I loved finding out tiny pieces about her life and her history and I loved that we learnt more about the relationship she had the previous year. Also a huge amount of love for the person she was in love with being transgender and going through gender reassignment. It was an unexpected yet wonderful twist, and I loved seeing pieces of their relationship. I’m hoping that we will actually meet him in the final instalment in the trilogy now that the build-up has reached this this point.

So whilst this book didn’t appeal to me in the same way as the first one, and suffered from several issues with pacing that left me feeling frustrated for the first part as I waited for the story to start pulling together and to draw me in, this is still a very good book. Not quite up to the standard of the first book but still a good bridge before the third one, which I am very anxious to read.

Review: As Red As Blood by Salla Simukka

Publication Date: 1st August 2014
Publisher: Skyscape
Length: 274 pages

In the midst of the freezing Arctic winter, seventeen-year-old Lumikki Andersson walks into her school’s dark room and finds a stash of wet, crimson-colored money. Thousands of Euros left to dry—splattered with someone’s blood.
Lumikki lives alone in a studio apartment far from her parents and the past she left behind. She transferred into a prestigious art school, and she’s singularly focused on studying and graduating. Lumikki ignores the cliques, the gossip, and the parties held by the school’s most popular and beautiful boys and girls.
But finding the blood-stained money changes everything. Suddenly, Lumikki is swept into a whirlpool of events as she finds herself helping to trace the origins of the money. Events turn even more deadly when evidence points to dirty cops and a notorious drug kingpin best known for the brutality with which he runs his business.
As Lumikki loses control of her carefully constructed world, she discovers that she’s been blind to the forces swirling around her—and she’s running out of time to set them right. When she sees the stark red of blood on snow, it may be too late to save her friends or herself.

This book was not what I expected. I don’t really know what I’d expected exactly, but after hearing good things about it I launched straight in without even reading the blurb. It’s dark, it’s gritty, and it had me racing through the pages to put it all together. It’s a very strange book, possibly in part due to it being a translation as it wasn’t written in English. That can lead in some places to some very odd sentences and moments that didn’t quite flow right, but are easily forgiven.

To start with I was highly confused. There is a lot of confusion with so many different character perspectives and not all of them are named and then there are flashbacks and really you have no idea where you might be and which character you might be with at any given point. It’s a jarring way of writing and reading to get used to and at first I really wasn’t sure if this book was going to be my cup of tea as I really wasn’t getting into it. However, a few chapters in when things begin to start unravelling and you have a better grasp of who is who, something clicks. And from that point I could not put the book down. I raced through it in a matter of hours, I just had to know how it would all come together. And the tension! It’s a short book but the tension is sky high. I didn’t even realise how stressed and invested in it I was until I finished and had to spend five minutes deliberately relaxing all my muscles from the clenched how on earth can this end well position I’d been in from around the halfway point.

It’s criminal that this book doesn’t have many high ratings on goodreads as I feel that it is seriously overlooked and under valued. Lumikki is a fantastic heroine with a troubled past who has worked hard to learn how to protect herself and keep herself safe. Some of the other characters were not as believable or engaging, but Lumikki really drove the story. I am very much looking forward to getting into the second book and seeing how Lumikki grows and evolves from the events of this book.

It’s so wonderful to read a YA book translated from another language and set somewhere other than the UK or US. It’s a quick read, barely over 250 pages and you will tear through it as the stakes get higher and the intrigue thickens. I can’t recommend this book enough and I hope that more people discover it because at the moment it is being criminally overlooked.