Quicksand

Author/Guide: Malin Persson Giolito

Why a Booktrail?

2000s: Guilty or not guilty?

ISBN: 978-1471160325
Genre: Psychological

Comment

What you need to know before your trail

Is Maja a normal eighteen-year-old, the poster girl-next-door, popular and excelling at her schoolwork, caught in the middle of a terrible tragedy? Or is she the most reviled teenager in the country?

Either way, everyone knows her name. She has spent nine excruciating months in jail, awaiting trial for a mass murder that killed her boyfriend and her best friend, and now the time has come for her to enter the courtroom…

Locations

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Travel Guide

Stockholm

The setting of the novel but only as a backdrop for the only real setting is the school where the incident takes place and more importantly the Court where the case pans out. The flashbacks to Maja’s school days and days leading up to the shooting. Imagine knowing a teenager who is accused of committing a mass murder with their boyfriend in their school. The school an the city in general are in shock, outraged and horrified. This is the real landscape of the novel – first person narration of events which spiralled scarily out of control.

Maja seems very calm for a killer, and as her life is explained, you get a very changeable picture of a girl who has ended up in a very difficult situation, to put it mildly. She’s like any other teenager – adolescent angst aplenty, and is not a likeable girl when it boils down to it. This adds layers of doubts and denials to her narration. Seeing the tragedy and the events leading up to that day is horrific, awful, worrying, poignant and makes you think. Her relationship with Sebastien adds levels of more grief and troubling developments.

The youngster’s relationships with the society, the city around them is shockingly bleak and inward looking. An eye looking down on the stage below.

Quicksand

Booktrailer Review

Susan: @thebooktrailer

A powerful read. Gets in your head, messes with your head and then leaves you reeling. I wasn’t sure I was going to like this from the premise if I’m honest as often courtroom dramas can be a little dry. This wasn’t – it was pull and push and a short sharp stop and then we were off again. Being inside that girl’s head was not an easy experience but it’s a good writer who can make me uncomfortable but make me not want to stop reading at the same time.

I’ve not really read such an intense book before – but intense in a good way – in that way it never lets up . It’s a heck of an experience to go through and boy do these characters put you through a journey. There’s no locations in the booktrail sense unless the inside of a courtroom is your thing and they are rather nice in Stockholm at least from the outside! I’ve only been inside one once, and I swear as I was finishing this one night in bed, the silence has never seemed so loud. The moment the gavel dropped on the verdict? I’m not surprised this was popular in Sweden. Scandi Noir just got that little bit more disturbing. Did I think this was a grab by the throat, punch in the gut kind of read? Skyldig (Guilty)