“Lykke delivers! … Nina Lykke once again serves up a three-course novel with a full wine package about the spoiled Norwegian middle class … Norwegian literature’s uncrowned queen of breakdowns … Lykke portrays Ida with a rare mixture of tenderness and satirical clarity … Nina Lykke has once again written a furious novel that shows where the line should be drawn when faced with the trivialities of contemporary life … she has mastered the format to perfection.”
5/6 stars
Gabriel Michael Vosgraff Moro, VG

“A powerful plot about manipulative psychological terror in which the victim is about to lose her footing… Nina Lykke writes with psychological insight and entertaining sharpness… an entertaining novel, the encounters with clients in conversations are tasteful confections… Lykke continues to hone her lively language by exploring a new professional group (women with their hopeless children and difficult husbands), with psychological insight and entertaining sharpness.”
5/6 stars
Stein Roll, Adresseavisen

“With great weight and a touch of lightness, Nina Lykke examines the lifelong relationship between mother and child … Nina Lykke’s new novel is more than a humorous commentary on society … How the mother first collapses under the confusion, and then the loss, is one of the most poignant depictions of rupture, regardless of relationship, that I have read in a long time … Thus, the question posed in the title, Where Are the Grown Ups?, has a breadth that encompasses more than the relationship between Ida and her son. Lykke depicts a modern society where no one really manages to take responsibility, and their problems are always caused by someone other than themselves. It is particularly in this broad focus that Lykke masters the balance between seriousness and humour, weight and lightness, for which she is known from her other works.
Sigrid Strømmen, Vårt Land

“Nina Lykke writes powerfully and wisely about understanding people … This is excellent writing by Nina Lykke. This novel is an example of how a text can be hugely engaging without containing spectacular conflicts or clever intrigue … Nina Lykke has managed to portray the living in a novel that is well thought out and good from the first letter to the last sentence, funny, infamous, sometimes delightfully politically incorrect, and sharp in its analysis of our time as something like the dictatorship of the child.”
Odd W. Surén, Dag og Tid

“In a way, Nina Lykke has created her own genre. Piece by piece and with a sharp eye, she tackles women’s lives and relational challenges. Where Are the Grown Ups? shows that she is still the boss in her literary universe … Nina Lykke’s strength is her ability to create literature from both silly trivialities and existential pain. The language is casual and easy to read, but with sufficient precision to elicit both chuckles and self-examination. When Nina Lykke sets out to take the pulse of the zeitgeist, it is a joy to follow along.”
5/6 stars
Tone Solberg, Tara

“Nina Lykke is expected to write laugh-out-loud comedy, but in her new novel, the jokes give way to a darker and more subdued zeitgeist … Where are the adults? is not primarily about ill-mannered kids sitting with dirty trainers on the seats of the underground or about curling parents who voluntarily allow themselves to be treated as their offspring’s servants – well, that too – but just as much about the unequal power relationship between parents and children on a deeper psychological level. The novel, which is well written and easy to read, is more tragic than comical. It’s serious now”
5/6 stars
Inger Bentzrud, Dagbladet