Udyr

Bjerkeland walks a careful line between being mindful of her audience’s age while refusing to shrink from the truth. Filled with tension and a few heart-pounding moments, Beasts never fully strays into the darker recesses like its postapocalyptic adult cousins The Road or I Who Have Never Known Men, yet it also resists easy answers or a storybook ending.

It’s a balance that clearly works: The author’s biography notes that 10,000 schoolchildren chose the novel for Norway’s top bookseller’s prize. With its propulsive prose and its central siblings whose survival is powered by empathy, Beasts is likely to garner praise from far more readers than that in the United States and beyond.

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– Priyanka Champaneri, The Washington Independent

https://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/bookreview/beasts, 18.04.2025

Beasts have invaded thirteen-year-old Abdi’s homeland. With their hoofed feet, long arms, slender hands, and razor-sharp claws, the beasts pursue and kill every living creature. The government has collapsed; there’s no electricity; supermarkets are empty. What’s even worse is the way people have turned against one another, fighting for survival. When their mother is killed, Abdi flees through open country with his little sister, hoping to reach the coast and find a boat to take them overseas to their father. Bjerkeland’s propulsive tale is sleek and elegant, a subtle blend of fable and realism that increasingly reflects many of today’s desperate refugees’ experiences. Every sentence is direct and brief, vivid with eventfulness, uncertainty, and Abdi’s deep sense of responsibility for his sister. Even moments of rest and relative safety—the pleasure of food or the solace of finding one trustworthy adult—are highly charged. “I missed grown ups,” Abdi laments, and in these few words Bjerkeland evokes the failed adult world, the injustice that plays itself out on children. The story’s brevity and abrupt forcefulness, and the characters’ stalwart courage and love, make this tale unusually compelling.

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– Horn Book, Horn Book Magazine

Bjerkeland's propulsive tale is sleek and elegant, a subtle blend of fable and realism (...). Every sentence is direct and brief, vivid with eventfulness, uncertainty (...)“I missed grown ups,” Abdi laments, and in these few words Bjerkeland evokes the failed adult world, the injustice that plays itself out on children. The story’s brevity and abrupt forcefulness, and the characters’ stalwart courage and love, make this tale unusually compelling.

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– Horn Book Magazine, Horn Book Magazine

En dystopisk fortelling full av skrekk og fortvilelse.
«Udyr» er en sjeldent skummel ungdomsbok som virkelig får hårene til å reise seg i nakken og gir deg trangen til nok en gang å sjekke at utgangsdøra er låst.

(...) Boka har stort lesedriv, få karakterer og et aktivt og enkelt språk.
Den egner seg best for de som er skikkelig glad i grøssere.

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– Leser søker bok, 100-lista - Leser søker bok

Den här får ingen missa!

Från första sidan håller den läsaren på helspänn, och långt efter läsningen lever den här skildringen inuti.

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– Bokmagasinet Vi läser, Bokmagasinet Vi läser (Sverige)