Although I found the shift in time frames rather confusing at first with all the different characters I soon became involved in this mystery. A good translation, the tense atmosphere of the writing and the story itself were made all the more tense by the python and Liv's intense, almost sexual, relationship with it.
Three and a half stars for me.
Many thanks to Netgalley/Silje Ulstein/Atlantic Books for a digital copy of this title. All opinions expressed are my own.

Thank you to Atlantic Books for the ARC! I really loved this, but I can also see why others don't. I think this is a very marmite kind of read and I don't think either party is necessarily wrong. It's definitely unusual, and for me I found it very interesting, gripping, and ingenious. I absolutely will be finding a copy so I can read it again.

Not an enjoyable read for me and it’s hard to say why because the more I think about it the more confused I get. My least favourite charActer was not the snake so that probably sums up the book for me.

Extremely wild but kind of unsatisfying. Yes, all the threads are tied up so it’s complete as a thriller/police procedural, but there isn’t one bad guy doing all the crimes, just a series of weird and terrible people.

Impossible to describe just how brilliantly dark and strange this Norweigan thriller is. Definitely not for the faint hearted but if you like your fiction to be fiendishly complex and veering on the macabre - this is one for you.

What starts out as a missing child case, soon becomes way more complex as we move back in time, and hear from several different perspectives - including a snake's!

Weird? Undoubtedly. Brilliant. Definitely.

Reptile Memoirs is a book that slithers and hisses its way into your consciousness. The story is of two missing children, 13 years apart and what happened to them. Told in multiple narrative voices this is a book that requires concentration but repays it in spades. It wraps its sinuous, scaly body around your mind, hypnotising you with rhythmic movements even as you surrender to its gaze.

Reptile Memoirs has a dual timeline and the narrative switches rapidly back and forth between 2005 and 2017. Set in Norway, in two towns, Ålesund and Kristiansund, it is the story of Liv who has grown up a damaged young woman, emotionally scarred by her mother and abused by her sleazebag brother, Patrick.

As soon as she is able, Liv gets out of the family home and finds a room in a shared basement apartment whose other occupants, Egil and Ingvar, are party boys. There she indulges her dream of owning a snake and buys Nero, a baby Burmese python, whom she keeps in her room. It is on Nero that Liv showers all the love and affection that she has been denied in her short life. He becomes her surrogate child and she resists the efforts of her flatmates to parade the snake at parties and even imagines she can understand its insistent hissing. It’s not altogether a healthy relationship, but Liv has never had anyone to love and Nero is the object of all her affection to the extent that she anthropomorphises him.

Liv finds herself unable to form healthy relationships with anyone her own age, though it is only when she meets an artist, Anita that she finds some happiness.

Detective Roe Olsvik is turning 60. He carries his own damage; he lost his daughter in 2005 and he and his wife never recovered from that tragedy. Now he is with the Kristiansund Police Department, keeping himself to himself and always looking for answers to what happened to his ‘Kiddo’.

When he hears that Iben, the daughter of notable business woman Mariam Lind and local poliyician, Tor, has gone missing, he immediately suspects the parents – not least because Mariam is behaving very oddly indeed. Olsvik’s colleagues Ronja, Birte, and August, can’t quite understand why he is so fixated on that angle and they have their own suspicions about Roe’s behaviour.

Reptile Memoirs is a book that shifts perspectives and timelines constantly which means you do have to focus quite intently, which is sometimes irritating in the midst of a serpentine plot dynamic where the pacing ebbs and flows. It is ambitious and unsettling – really quite unsettling in the case of Liv’s relationship with Nero, which is not for the faint-hearted.

But the plot is ingenious and very well done and as a result the surprises are genuinely thrilling and not a little jaw dropping. The psychological elements of this thriller are fascinating and brilliantly done, down to the book’s most unusual voice.

Verdict: Dark and sinuous, Reptile Memoirs is a study in damaged personalities and relationships. It is full of dark secrets and the inheritance that comes with family traumas. Certainly distinctive, this is one book that will linger in the memory and not for anyone with Ophidiophobia. But for those who like their crime beautifully intense with a strong, intense psychological bent, this is a sure fire winner.

Honestly, I'm not really sure what I've just read!

Reptile Memoirs tells the story of Mariam, whose daughter is missing, alongside a story of Liv, a carefree young woman living with friends, and a large snake, in a flat share. The book is set across several different time frames and is narrated by many different characters, including the snake bizarrely!

The book took me a really long time to get into and for the first half I found it really hard to work out what was going on. The time frames moved around so frequently that it wasn't always obvious and I almost gave up.

However, I stuck with it; the final third of the book brought everything together and I started to find myself enjoying it. None of the characters were particularly likeable, except perhaps a couple of the minor ones. This book is dark and disturbing at times, but beneath all that there is a twisty mystery which I found myself needing to solve.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for sending me this ARC in return for an honest review.

Liv loves Nero but can a snake love a human? A child goes missing and Roe begins his investigation. We are taken back and forth with the main characters including the snake. Will Ibsen be found safe?
Book full of intrigue that you must keep reading to understand relationships and responsibilities. Dark, thought provoking and very addictive read, enjoy.

Reptile Memoirs almost defies description. I appears to be a Nordic thrilller about the disappearance of a young girl but there are so many different strands to the story that it encompasses far more.
The first third of the novel totally confused me, it jumps from character to character, between the missing girls parents, the police and a seemingly unrelated young woman and her pet snake 12 years later. As the strands come together if becomes more coherent but still a deeply unsettling read, particularly Liv’s relationship with the snake, Nero.
Upon reflection, Reptile Memoirs was a really worthwhile novel, even though it made me feel quite ill in places. I’d never considered what a python needs to eat to stay alive. Above all it is brilliantly written and artfully plotted, it will stay with me for a long time. I’m sure Silje Ulstein will become a major force on the Nordic noir scene.
Thank you to #netgalley and #grovepressuk for allowing me to review this ARC

The cover promises a cold-blooded thriller, and that's exactly what you get. Deliciously dark and impressively distinctive, Reptile Memoirs is a spine-tingling thriller with an unusual and intriguing concept and bleak atmosphere.

Set over two timelines and told through five characters, the story takes a little while to come together. I was worried that it was all going to go over my head at first as I couldn't see how the timelines were going to be connected. But it still had me gripped, as I cautiously turned every page, not knowing what to expect next.

The question of "Can you ever really shed your skin?" is such a brilliant one to pose. Just asking it puts the darkest thoughts in your mind, and this book certainly goes there. There are a fair few trigger warnings to be careful of as certain scenes made me gasp out loud. But if you enjoy a thriller that steps over the boundaries, this is definitely a book worth checking out.

The best way for me to describe it is to say that it's like The Last House On Needless Street (with its own animal narrator) combined with a Scandi Noir mystery. So if you enjoy either of those, you're sure to enjoy being trapped in the coils of this one.

I also have to say that the translator, Alison McCullough, has done a fantastic job. I sometimes struggle with translated books as I find that they can sometimes lack the details, but I constantly got goosebumps from the unnerving atmosphere that Ulstein conjures up, so McCullough has done brilliantly to translate the chilling tone so well.

(I'm on the tour for this on 15th March so my reviews will be live then)

Very weird, very dark and very good. At its centre, a detective story involving a missing girl and people trying to shake off their past and also featuring a python which, of course, narrates its own story - what's not to like?!
Thank you to netgalley and Atlantic books for an advance copy of this book

I remember reading Filth by Irvine Welsh once and thinking ‘Jesus, there’s chapters narrated by a tapeworm’. Brilliant novel with a perspective that resonated. Well, this novel is nothing like Filth, however, does have chapters narrated by a snake. Personally, I’m not sure what this adds to the novel I read - it’s a thriller! Take the snake chapters out though and I quite enjoyed this. The writing was great, the characters compelling and there are some twists that blew me away - the only issue is the amount of character perspectives which were difficult to keep track of. Take the snake away and it’s a little tidier! All in all, a good example of Norwegian crime writing.

A dark and highly unusual literary thriller. However, the style of writing was not to my taste and I had to dnf.

Wow! I absolutely loved this twisty thriller mystery. I won't rehash the blurb but it is essentially about the messed up life of a woman who has a very unhealthy obsession with her 'pet' python. An extremely engrossing story that kept me gripped from the beginning to the very last page. One of my favourite reads of this year so far and HIGHLY recommended.

Norway the story moves between 2003 and 2017. A young woman named Liv shares an apartment with two young men Ingvar and Egil. They all purchase a snake a young Burmese tiger python and call it Nero. Liv however considers Nero hers.
Liv is complicated. Born and named Sara she hates her mother and brother Patrick. For years she had to share a bedroom with her brother and their mother ignored the fact that Patrick was sexually abusing his sister. As a consequence Liv is damaged.
Liv befriends Anita who is in an abusive relationship. Anita gives birth and soon after both mother and baby are found dead after a fire. Liv is also friendly with David who is a criminal who likes Liv, when there is a brutal murder both Liv and Nero vanish.
Years later Mariam is at the supermarket with her young daughter Iben. They have a big disagreement and the daughter walks off and goes missing. Mariam is married to a much older man who is not Iben's father. Mariam now starts to act in a strange manner as she tries to find her daughter.
Roe is a police detective nearing retirement and he is investigating Iben's disappearance. He suspects Mariam of hurting her daughter. Ronja a young female detective is concerned that Roe is obsessed with Mariam.
What has happened to Liv and Nero? Told with the voices of several people including the snake! This feels weird at first but it works. There are some difficult scenes to read but the story is compelling. This has been a best seller in Norway and is good and different. An author to follow. Recommended.

I feel like I've been reading this for so long, and the pay off totally wasn't worth it! I have an intense fear and loathing of snakes so you may wonder "why the hell are you reading this book?" but it sounded weird and weird always intrigues me. Unfortunately all the characters were boring, actually the most intresting parts were the chapters told from the snakes perspective. The story took ages to get going and it has some truly disturbing scenes in it and really grotesque imagery, but the common thread running through it all was flimsy at best. Poor execution.

"Reptile Memoirs" by Silje Ulstein is quite a novel book. Many books have two timelines but this is the first that has introduced a third, narrated by a snake! It might sound bizarre,and at times it was a strange concept, but this does work as it ties the book together. Slightly obsessive characters, classic crime and a snake thrown in. What's not to like?

Well this was one weird read. Certainly original but also not without its flaws.

Set in Norway, this is kind of a thriller, kind of a character study and also slightly surreal.

We have a huge cast of characters here and they all have chapters, which alternate between two timelines. This doesnt work as well as it should as it causes a lot of confusion and I found it hard to keep track of who was who and where I was.

The first half of the book is extremely slow, to the point where I thought about giving up but, just as I was losing interest it dragged me back in and I kept going. The second half of the book is much stronger and the pace certainly picks up and things begin to unravel and tie together. It does make sense of the somewhat confusing first half but the pacing I found very uneven, almost like reading two separate books.

This book is very very dark. The subject matter very disturbing. Throw in a snake that our main protagonist is infatuated with who also narrates his own chapters then you might begin to understand the strangeness of this tale.

Its ultimately a tale about change, about reinvention, about things coming full circle. A story of revenge, of abuse, of secrets and gods knows what else, theres a hell of a lot packed in here. Perhaps too much as the author struggled at times to keep all the plates spinning.

Despite that, it does all resolve itself and most of it makes sense in the end. There are also a few clever twists at the end that I didnt see coming so kudos to the author for that.

Would I describe this book as a thriller? Yes in parts. A police procedural? Yes in parts. A character study? Yes in parts. A surreal metaphorical tale? Yes in parts.

Despite my misgivings above and for sure the books isnt without its faults, I found the writing and the ideas in storytelling refreshing, new and interesting. I went from almost dnf to ultimate page turner on more than one occasion. Plus who doesnt love a snake as a part narrator in a twisted tale?

I thought long and hard about my star rating for this one and settled on 3 as a fair score for me. Its a 3.5 star book for me for the originality but with its faults I couldnt justify 4 stars.

Would I recommend this book? Yes I would. I would advise you to stick with it if you find it hard going as it does ultimately pay off.

One thing is for sure. Silje O. Ulstein certainly has my attention and is a name I will be looking out for in the future with a sense of anticipation.

Thanks to the publisher for the ARC through Netgalley.

One of my most anticipated reads of 2022, and surprisingly gonna keep this short on here…
-
BUY THIS BOOK. This book was so different to many books I’ve read, such a unique and interesting story. Liv’s narrative in particular was SO mind bending to read at times that I felt uncomfortable whilst reading some parts… but for me that was the mark of a good story, to make you feel and emote with the text
-
Thank you so much to Atlantic & Netgalley for the ARC

I do enjoy dark fiction, especially scandi noir but unfortunately this one wasn’t for me. I felt uncomfortable with some parts of Liv’s story and because of this I think I just couldn’t get into the other narratives.