High school outsider Maja would never hurt herself on purpose as her dad, teachers, and classmates seem to believe. Can't a person saw off the tip of her thumb without everyone starting to worry? That is, everyone except Maja's mum, who seems to have disappeared from the face of earth. Crashing a neighbor's party, Maja meets twenty-year-old Justin Case, a super-verbal car mechanic with pink pants, who makes her forget everything about absent mothers and sawn-off thumbs, at least temporarily. But then Maja hacks into her father's e-mail account and reads an e-mail that hurts more than all the electric saws in the world. In this funny and clever coming-of-age novel, seventeen-year-old Maja describes each moment with such bare-bones honesty that one can't help but be drawn into her world. Wise beyond her years yet still surprisingly naïve, her story is entertaining and enlightening, at turns both hilarious and bittersweet.
Author
Jenny Jägerfeld made her literary debut in 2006 with a hole in my head. Her second novel, Me on the Floor, Bleeding, was in 2010 rewarded with The August Prize for best youth novel in Sweden. It’s her first novel translated to English. Originally a child psychologist, she now runs her own psychologist practice in Stockholm. She also works for the Swedish national radio, in a radio show about psychological matters.
