“My life was like playing mikado, fishing out one stick after another without ever letting the pile collapse.”

A ten-year-old girl narrates the year that cracks her family quietly open. In 1980s Reykjavík, her mother won’t leave the bedroom, her father offers no warmth, and her brother’s cruelty is something she’s learned to absorb in silence, because keeping the peace means staying small. Told entirely through the girl’s eyes, Mikado asks the reader to do what she does every day: read between the lines of a household built on appearances.

Away from home she finds friendship, glimpses of tenderness between other siblings, and examples of normal family life. At home, the violence surfaces at last, and so does her mother’s voice. It is written with a sly, deadpan wit that sits right alongside the family’s quiet violence, in a world that is by turns suffocating and full of possibility.

A quiet, exacting portrait of a girl teaching herself to take up space, and the family that taught her not to. By the end, little has changed on the surface, yet the girl herself has taken real steps toward independence and safety.

“The darling poet of the Icelandic nation … the most popular poet of her generation …”
FRETTABLADID DAILY