I picked up this novel because I heard that Hustvedt had based the town she calls Webster on Northfield, MN. Indeed, the details of Division Street, the Ideal cafe, the Stuart hotel, the community theater at the Arts Guild, the names and personality-types are all plucked straight from the reality of my experience in Northfield. That said, I found the story itself to be the weakest part of the novel. I anticipated much of the plot and the "twists" were no surprise. it wasn't until the end of the book that the characters seemed approachably human and by then there wasn't enough story left to engage with them. I've given it three stars because I enjoyed the way the backdrop of Northfield was worked into the book but in all other ways it left me feeling it was just "ok." ( )

An unsettling tale set in small town America. Centred on 19-year old Lily Dahl, a waitress and aspiring actress, it is part rites of passage and part psychological thriller, populated with a memorable cast of eccentric misfits. Probably not the best starting point for anyone who has not read any Hustvedt, but still interesting, enjoyable and well written. ( )

This didn't grab me quite in the way that The blazing world did: maybe I simply found it easier to connect with the document-based structure of that book than the very visual, film-like style of this one. But Lily Dahl is definitely a very impressive novel, and one that you can't sum up in a few sentences.

When we call something a "coming-of-age novel", it usually just means that it's an adolescent love-story, but — at one level — this really is a book about a young woman going through a transformative experience that leaves her a different sort of person at the end from what she was at the beginning. But it's also a philosophical investigation into what we mean by artistic creation, and how the process of representation affects the artist and the subject. And it's a sort of detective story, and a nostalgic/ironic look back at 1960s American small-town life and its uneasy relationship with the world of ideas. And how gender and sexuality and violence and Shakespeare and Marilyn Monroe fit into all that. I've got a feeling that we're not in Lake Wobegon anymore... ( )

Hoe een Scandinavisch klinkende naam je kan misleiden... ( )

I loved her novel " Summer without Men" and I also read " What I loved" with pleasure but I did not seem to get into this story so I stopped reading at page 71... ( )