I picked this for book club because the author gave a charming interview at BEA (2016) and lots of book clubs were doing it (+ the publisher gave me a free copy). So I thought what the heck... 
 I appreciated the charm of this fanciful tale at times, but at other times I was annoyed. Maybe it was translation problems (translated from Swedish). A lot of sentences were tagged with "actually, " and "...of course" and that kind of messy distraction. I was going to give this 2 stars but my rating went up after book discussion. The five lady attendees loved it. They said it was impressive for a first novel, they liked the "vivid characters," and really liked that it was "something different" and "original."