Safe Return Doubtful

translated by Lytton Smith
This is a very strong ‘life during wartime’ novel that begins in a brutal way.
In an unnamed country during an unspecified war three soldiers come across a small and very isolated farm acting as an orphanage, with the name ‘Children In Reindeer Woods’, a place that the war has not yet arrived to. Two of the soldiers pretty much instantly kill everyone, accept one small girl who manages to hide. The third soldier is appalled, turns on his comrades and shoots them, and thereby deserting the war and his army. This happens all in the first couple of pages. The sense of violence imprints itself so strongly that you come to expect that what is lovely and peaceful could at any time henceforth be shattered by horror.
This is a story of survival, coping in the face of extreme adversity; of Rafael, the soldier with his new life as a farmer, and of Billie, an intelligent 11 year old girl who regresses frequently into a fantasy world with her dolls and the life she has know before. Their relationship develops as they realise they need each other, but sister-brother rather than any type of sexual awakening for Billie.
Ómarsdóttir’s writing is to subtle for this to become a thriller, or horror, and rather than engaging in tense, creepy moments or gore, she opts to delve into two very human characters, less committed to one another than they to the limbo that they find themselves in. As the novel proceeds the dialogue between them becomes more and more similar to the conversation Billie invents for her dolls, blurring the sense of reality and the theme that Ómarsdóttir chiefly addresses, the place of law, order and morality in the midst of war.