32 Playdate - Alex Dahl (Audible)
Alex Dahl is a Norwegian crime writer, and this novel is set mostly in her native Norway as well as the French Pyrenees. Elise Blix, wife, mother and air steward goes to pick up her daughter Lucia aged 7 from school, when Lucia begs her mother to let her go to her new found friend Josie's house. Josie has only recently arrived at the school. She is initially reluctant, mainly because she doesn't know the child's mother, who she meets only for the first time that afternoon and later when the playdate which she eventually agrees to turns into a sleepover, which necessitates her dropping off her daughter's overnight bag to their rather impressive house. In the meantime she has a short haul flight and is only alerted when she arrives back in Norway the next day, by panicking husband Frederik that he has been unable to make contact with the family with whom Lucia is staying. What transpires is an elaborate plot to spirit their daughter away, the house where Josie and mother were hosting, is an AirBB and the three of them have disappeared into thin air. The story unfolds through the police investigations, traffickers, an investigative journalist and the child Lucia who has been parachuted into a new life with a different identity. As the book progresses there are also revelations as to the backstories of both Lucia's parents Elise and Fredrick and how the possibility of skeletons in their cupboards may have been factors in their daughter's disappearance. The plot is multi- layered and complex, quite good though.
33 Digging to America - Anne Tyler
As always with Anne Tyler's books, set in Baltimore, the experiences of two different families who meet at the airport where they are there to meet a representatives from the adoption agency who will be handing them a Korean baby girl. During that fleeting meeting they forge a friendship of sorts bound together essentially by their daughters of the same ethnicity. The parents are entirely different in their attitude to how they will raise their respective children, all American couple Brad and Bitsy endeavour not to Americanize their daughter, they keep her Korean name Jin-Ho and teach her about Korean culture which proves quite futile, as she grows she increasingly embraces all things American. Meanwhile Iranian/American parents Sami and Ziba take the opposite approach with their daughter, dropping her Korean birth name for the rather boring "Susan" The story unfolds through numerous joint celebrations where the differences in their attitudes become apparent and at times these meet ups produce an underlying friction. There is also a romantic subplot as a separate relationship starts to flourish between Bitsy's recently widowed father and Sami's widowed mother, Maryam. The Iranian family are far more interesting and there are lots of descriptions about the different aspects of Iranian culture, how they celebrate their new year, food etc. Googling Anne Tyler her late husband was Iranian/American so I imagine she was drawing on her personal experiences. I enjoyed Digging to America, but not my favourite of her books.
