”A touching book which successfully tackles a depraved theme. Last year’s winner of the Brage Prize shows she can come up with the goods … Few authors could manage to haul such a depraved scenario ashore. But Fossum can. She has a unique feeling for language so she can take liberties others cannot … What might have been sentimental, becomes grippingly sad. The melodramatic, dramatic. And the child’s fury is not sentimentalized: she lets Mille be as horrid as only a child can be … As a reviewer in a small country like Norway, one should guard against constantly drawing parallels to Hamsun. But there is something about Fossum’s writing which makes me unable to restrain myself: the naive and beautiful description of human rage, of faith in God, and nature”
Dagbladet
”A fine balance between the painful and the witty seen through a child’s eyes … Fossum still writes prose that works and which makes the small grand”
Adresseavisen
”A frightening, puzzling novel … she writes so well and with such energy … solid, quality literature, without a doubt … language-wise, it is exciting and original”
NRK, Boktilsynet
”Dear Shepherd Boy is actually one of the strangest books I have read… The language is both tightly knit – clean-cut – and completely unspectacular, almost entirely stripped of metaphors and unambiguous symbolism. The text communicates its intentions only in extremely subtle ways; it is like observing a remote, almost averted world. But suddenly the text starts to offer – and it still does”
Klassekampen
“With Dear Shepherd Boy, Marita Fossum takes one step in what you almost truthfully could call the central prosaic Norwegian novel: There is childhood, there is summer, there is family – and not least there is an underlying seriousness, connected to death and nascent sexuality. But Fossum balances and conjures up her motif in a way that makes this a good reading experience, and in addition quite simply a wise book”
Morgenbladet
