[Review] Burial Rites - Hannah Kent

Publisher: Picador
Price: € 10,49
Page count: 330
Language: English

Contents

Iceland, 1829: Agnes is going to die. She is sentenced to death for double murder.
She only has a few months left that she is supposed to spend regretting her deeds and preparing for death. She is sent to live with a family on a farm as she cannot be kept anywhere else.
More and more the priest who tries to absolve her, and with him the reader, finds out what Agnes' real story is. Everything is not as it seems.

My opinion

This book is one of those that I initially wanted to buy because everyone who has read it seems to love it. I saw it again and again and then I read the synopsis and was intrigued. In addition to that, it was the first book ever that had only (!) five stars reviews on amazon (at least the English edition does). This was one of the biggest reasons for buying it, because it was so incredible that I wanted to see for myself if it is really that great or if the reviews are somehow manipulated (yes, it is that unbelievable to me).

And I can say, that I am totally with those people who gave this book five stars because it really deserves them. I cannot believe that this is Hannah Kent´s first novel, her writing style is so refined and absorbing that I couldn´t put the book down, although the story is not exciting in a conventional way. I just got caught up in the atmosphere and somehow the story felt very thick to me.

Probably I am rambling now, but I just had so many emotions while reading this book and I find it really hard to put them in words. It made me feel like I had a relationship with it, with the story and it felt like I know Agnes personally.

Hannah Kent was also able to create very unique characters, which are so round that I sometimes felt like they were sitting right beside me.

Agnes was a perfect protagonist and I loved that the story was told in third person, not from her point of view, I liked how we as readers only know as much as Agnes tells everybody else in this book. She is mysterious and somehow very likeable from the beginning, even when all you know is that she was sentenced to death for double murder / inciting two other persons to murder.

All this and the setting in Iceland add up to an extraordinary read, one that I could not forget about even a few days after finishing the book.

This was also the first book in a long time that made me read and love the afterword. I had the feeling that it really added to the story because it makes it feel much more real and even more terrible.

Overall I can recommend this book to anyone who wants to read something that stays with you and moves you, especially now that winter is coming (I cannot say this ordinary phrase without having to think about Game of Thrones, by the way).
So please, if you haven't read it yet, go into the next bookstore, buy it and read it!

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