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The Boy At The Door features one of the most irritating protagonists I've ever encountered, and the title still does not make sense to me. A lot of things about this book don't make sense but especially the title. The boy wasn't even at the door! He was in the swimming pool! HE WAS NOT AT THE DOOR.
The story is set in Norway, which was interesting, and our protagonist is Cecilia, who was not. Cecilia is a BITCH. I hated her so much and not even in a good way. Sometimes it's fun to hate main characters, but with Cecilia I didn't even have that pleasure. She's just a horrible person and that's that.
So Cecilia has the "perfect life" - a badly written husband who earns lots of money and doesn't have a personality, two little girls and a beautiful home. One evening when she collects her daughters from swimming class, she's asked to drop an unknown weird little boy home because nobody has come to get him. This starts the events of the book and the crashing down of Cecilia's perfect life.
When she brings him to his house, there's nobody there, and then Cecilia and her husband are asked to foster the kid, Tobias, because reasons. Somewhere along the line Cecilia realises that the boy is her secret son she had a few years before, the result of an affair when she was on holiday with her husband. She pawned the kid off on her absent father, who raised him until two drug addicts came to work on her dad's farm and kidnapped the boy for ransom. They were getting money from both Cecilia and the grandpa, then eventually left Tobias for his mother to find. The drug addicts were later found murdered.
CECILIA BEING A BITCH:
1. Cecilia abandoned her baby and left her father to raise him so it wouldn't destroy her "perfect life." Then when her son was kidnapped by drug addicts, she didn't really give a fuck about his welfare and just paid them off.
2. Cecilia constantly lies to everyone, including and especially her husband. This includes things like telling the eight year old Tobias that her husband is gay and she is a drug addict, pretending she was raped to avoid her husband finding out about her affair, pretending she was raped to her own mother and lying to police when they're investigating the death of Anni (the drug addict Tobias was living with) by saying she had no clue who she was when she had been blackmailed by her for months.
3. The social worker who takes on Tobias' case used to go to school with Cecilia, who surprise, used to bully her. Cecilia continuously talks about how ugly and disgusting she has become, and how she probably isn't married because no man could ever be interested in her.
4. The female police officer working on the murder of the drug addicts is very butch. Cecilia takes this to mean she's a lesbian and uses constant slurs and horrible remarks about how she would probably love to escort Cecilia to the bathroom etc etc.
5. Cecilia doesn't really seem to care about her kids much. Her daughters are CONSTANTLY just looking at their iPads instead of being taken care of/having a conversation with their mother.
6. She doesn't respect her husband at all. He's badly written and is basically a cardboard cut out who lets Cecilia walk all over him and lie to him constantly. Cecilia believes men need to be treated men to be kept keen, even when you've been married to them for ten years. Fun.
What a loving mother and wife.
THE PLOT
Was awful. There were so many weird turns and ridiculous things.
1. In what reality and country would a random child nobody knows of be sent home with a random family. When nobody came to pick up Tobias, the realistic thing to do was for the adults in the situation to call police/child services, no?
2. Also, what kind of social workers force families to foster random kids, lmao. Cecilia is COMPLETELY against the idea of fostering Tobias, yet the social workers for some reason insist that she has to.
3. Nothing about the drug addicts/their murders makes sense until you read the little snippets of Anni's diary. Relying on diary entries to tell your readers the plot is lazy and stupid. As a writer you shouldn't have to rely on convenient diary entries or letters to explain the plot.
4. Why did Cecilia knit a teddy bear for a baby she supposedly never gave a shit about? So Tobias had this lil knitted bear his mother made for him when he was born. That just sounds so completely unlike our dear Cecilia.
5. After Cecilia got pregnant with Tobias, she went to stay with her dad for nine months. Her husband was never suspicious and never tried to visit her. Sure.
6. In the middle of the book, Cecilia has some kind of psychotic episode for literally no reason other than she isn't getting her own way. She ends up in a mental ward for like two days, then goes home and is back to her old bitchy self.
This book was just......
Unlikable main characters are okay, but not when they absolutely repulse you. Weak plot points, bad secondary characters and convenient diary entries make for a book I wanted to nope right out of.
