Little Finn lives with his mother in an apartment in a working-class suburb of Oslo. Life is a struggle to make ends meet, but he does not mind. When his mother decides to take a lodger to help pay the bills, he watches with interest as she freshens up their small apartment with new wallpaper and a sofa paid for in installments. He befriends their new male lodger, whose television is more tempting to him than his mother would like. When a half-sister whom he never knew joins the household, Finn takes her under his wing over an everlasting summer on Håøya Island. But he can't understand why everyone thinks his new sister is so different from every other child. Nor can he fathom his mother's painful secret, one that pushes them ever farther apart. As summer comes to a close, Finn must attempt to grasp the incomprehensible adult world and his place within it.
Child Wonder is a powerful and unsentimental portrait of childhood. Roy Jacobsen, through the eyes of a child, has produced an immensely uplifting novel that shines with light and warmth.
"[Roy Jacobsen] shares the blunt, gentle grace and narrative ease of his countryman Per Petterson. . . . A gloriously intelligent novel that is so rewarding, funny, sad and human that the only advice to be given is to read it."
Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times
"More obviously artful than To Kill a Mockingbird, Child Wonder is as powerful and more contemporarily relevant."
Booklist
"[Child Wonder] is a wonderful, evocative yet in the end rather enigmatic story of a Norwegian childhood where things seem to be going one way but are really going another. If a story can be said to be both languid and propulsive at the same time it is this one. It is really a quiet marvel. I enjoyed it immensely."
