Sican has changed her name from Siv hoping to reinvent herself after moving to Stockholm but eighteen months into her course, she’s still friendless and living in spartan student accommodation, constantly anxious that her peers are laughing at her. She's a child of benign neglect, loved by parents too caught up in their work to pay their daughter the attention needed to raise a child or to notice the bullying she’s subjected to by her schoolmates. With her cultivated slovenliness, Hanna's a very different sort of misfi,t seemingly impervious to what others think of her. An odd sort of friendship begins between these two until eventually Hanna invites Sican to share the palatial, fin de siècle apartment she's inherited. When Sican meets Abbe, she begins a relationship which pushes Hanna to the fringes of her life. Over the year or so the novel spans, Sican learns how to be a lover and a friend, taking steps into an adult life that might be different from the one she'd thought she’d have.
Mustard uses the same understated, gently witty style that worked so well in her debut, Okay Days, conveying Sican’s painful awareness of her social ineptitude with a tenderness that made me want to cheer her small triumphs and ache for her setbacks. The end is brilliantly done, neatly swerving cliché and illustrating how far Sican has come. A quietly accomplished novel: I’m looking forward to Mustard’s third outing.