“Kjersti’s sparkling intellect resonates beautifully but painfully through a crisp and unprocessed writing style, always candid and totally illuminating … A unique novel, spirited and true … This is a noble and gracious account of what it means to be human”
RTE, Ireland

“A powerful and personal story of a teen with chronic fatigue syndrome who finds madness and solace…and eventually a tether to the world beyond her bed…through writing. While the novel examines internal experience of sickness and loss, it’s also a simultaneous critique/celebration of the writing life.”
Lithub/40 Overlooked Books from 2017/Kevin Elliott, Seminary Co-op, Chicago

“A tour de force of autofiction … an ambitious mix of evolvement, memoirs and depiction. The result is fragmental, yet psychologically coherent … a lengthy, fascinating and delightfully non-whining story about how the urge to write can defeat even the most stubborn of demons.”
Weekendavisen (Denmark)

“Skomsvold is rather sharp, also in her surveillance of herself. She has a delicate eye for the fact that Kjersti’s self-hatred and self-absorption are two sides to the same story, and this story releases a sort of dramatic splendidness in Kjersti … Skomsvold also has a good grip on the protagonist’s almost manipulative charm … Can one be self-aware and naive at the same time? It doesn’t sound easy, but perhaps. Skomsvold’s book poses these kinds of questions abundantly.”
Information (Denmark)

“The story itself is at its best when it pulls its surroundings into the friendships and love affairs the protagonist end up in, among them a fine and frailly depicted anxious relation to a female literary idol. In the greatest moments of the book, the delicate membrane between the almost skinless patient and the ambitiously language aware author vibrates and glimmers”
Berlingske Tidende (Denmark)

“Monsterhuman is a peculiar novel, that I grew tired of, yet could not put away. I resisted the structure, but the language is musical and I dragged myself through all 565 pages and ended up thinking: She is good company, that Kjersti Annesdatter Skomsvold”
Søndag (Denmark)

“a brilliantly beautiful start, frail like a heart and fine as porcelain”
Kristeligt Dagblad (Denmark)

“Monsterhuman is definitely a most readable novel … It covers several years, and as the reader, I was moved that she succeeded in rediscovering the joy of life”
litteratursiden.dk (Denmark)

“A great read, despite the sad state of things. Already on the first pages, the reader is elegantly hooked, and practically twirled into the author’s desperately joyful life of writing … It is this unfiltered and insisting vulnerability and will for a gaze from the outside which carries this exceptionally brave, well-written and original story … Skomsvold exposes herself with a generosity that will leave you utterly charmed … It is all so painfully familiar, yet so playful, undaunted and dry-witted, it is hard not to name this novel one of the highlights of this autumn.”
Dagsavisen

“a book you wish would never end.[…] The novel is a mosaic of snapshots that add up to great literature. Skomsvold possesses a unique ability to discern things the rest of us often miss; her lopsided view of the world is filled with warmth, and can transform the driest literary scholar into a lively cabaret artist. [… The novel] is unfathomably sad and unbelievably funny. It is heart-searching, vulnerable, deeply personal yet never feels private. On the contrary, it feels important. This is a book about wanting to belong in the universe, about believing in oneself, not being so afraid. We need to be reminded of these things. For over a week, I have lived with Monsterhuman. I have gone to bed with it, woken up with it, read in every spare moment, laughed and cried. Few novels have had this effect on me. It feels wrong that it has ended. I hope Kjersti Skomsvold continues to write books I can live with in the future.”
Dagbladet

“Superb about body and mind […] Monsterhuman is a tremendously good novel about disease, body and identity. Who am I when my body is ill, year after year? […] Skomsvold writes herself into the most outstanding of Western essayistic literature: About her body, her self-image, about insight and realisation. About Blanchot, Muller, Jelinek, Proust, Beckett, Hemingway and Brodskij. One can do nothing but applaud. This is great literature, she writes with peril and with an absorbing desire to be moved. She writes about literature that is more real than reality. She writes about herself as someone else. About choosing bravely, about choosing happiness. She writes about her struggle to express herself. It is a life-and-death struggle […] In her descriptions about the relation between fiction and reality, Skomsvold is in a league of her own. She has created a meta-novel, a novel about writing a novel. She is deeply personal, but writes with a universal authority. This is called art.”
Vårt Land

“A luminous autobiography. Few, if any, Norwegian authors share Kjersti Annesdatter Skomsvold’s special eye for the tragicomic aspects of life. Her second book is a solid, sore – and funny – autobiographical novel about suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome. […] a book about friendship, love, family, loneliness, life and death, in short about everything that life has to offer, everything that creates a human being.”
Bergens Tidende

“Monsterhuman encompasses everything I wanted Karl Ove Knausgård’s My struggle – Fifth book to give me: an intellectual depiction of how you become a writer – and which literature is of importance on this journey. The genious tool Skomsvold uses is that the narrator Kjersti, who has fatigue, does not desperately want to become an author. She wants to become a human being again. But “If I become a book, I also become a human being”, because “a novel cannot be written by a nothing, a novel has to be written by a human being, This way, Monsterhuman is not just an intellectual, but also a deeply existential novel. It is also very witty. My God, how glorious! […] Skomsvold has written an unusually good psychological portrait, depicted with warmth, insight and dry, witty humour. If you ask me, Monsterhuman is one of the best novels this year!”
Dag og Tid 

“Powerful, tragic and optimistic. […] a tremendously brave piece of literature, which at its best sparkles and gives the reader experiences not easily forgotten. A text that confirms a great talent.”
NRK Kulturnytt

“This novel is both fascinating, annoying and annoyingly fascinating. […] There are two reasons why Skomsvold will get away with this project. The first one is that she is damned good. She is disarmingly funny, she can relay pain, and her observations are razor-sharp. The second is that she uses the novel for a purpose. This is not a private confessional project, but a bildungsroman which also captures the greater picture; the time and society we live in, with high precision.”
Adresseavisen

“Roll over, Knausgård, there is a new master of autobiographical novels in town! … Kjersti writes a novel, one post-it note at the time. Monsterhuman depicts its becoming, in a language which in an intelligent way mirrors the content, from illness to health, fear to success. A story of illness, yes. But still far from mushy and sentimental”
Dagsavisen (Recommendation of the week)

“The author is very capable of turning her own misfortune into something universally recognisable.”
VG

“Cheeky, funny and autobiographical. An imperfect giant of a book about how long-term disease leads to writing and literature”
VG, Book of the Year 2012

“This novel reminds me why I love to read … a genuine and funny book about something as serious as feeling alone in the world, about anxiety for living and joy of reading”
Stavanger Aftenblad, Critics’ Favourites 2012

“Skomsvold excels … When the body is out of the running, language is all the more precious. In Skomsvold’s novel, we notice her linguistic self-awareness, and how thin the membrane between her and the novel is”
Vårt Land, Critics’ Favourites 2012

“Gallows humour on how a book project becomes the way out of ME-disease”
VG, Book of the Year 2012

“the novel excellently mixes tragedy and comedy”
Bergens Tidende, Book of the Year 2012

“Skomsvold exposes herself with a playful and irresistible generosity.”
Natt og Dag, 5 Best Books of the Year 2012