Alicja has just moved to a ramshackle house in the country side with her mom and dad. It might have gone well if not for the fact that her mom is so very Polish. She forces Alicja’s friends to eat soup made from vegetables boiled to a mush (sugar&nbs ...
Alicja has just moved to a ramshackle house in the country side with her mom and dad. It might have gone well if not for the fact that her mom is so very Polish. She forces Alicja’s friends to eat soup made from vegetables boiled to a mush (sugar beets? onion? potato?) with some kind of meat (pork? chicken? human?) and asks things no Swedish mom would ever ask.
As if that was not enough, Mom’s chain smoking cousin Sylwia and her daughter move in. Celestyna takes Alicja’s clothes and Sylwia forces Alicja to come to Vadstena with them when the pope visits Sweden. Of course it ends in a catastrophe; Sylwia gets arrested when, in her pope worship frenzy, she storms the stage. Celestyna disappears and Alicja herself accidentally breaks the newly planted holy tree. Why couldn’t they just go on an ordinary outing, like all the ordinary Swedish families?
Emmy Abrahamson takes us on a trip between high and low, tragic and comic. With much humor and great warmth she portrays cultural head-on collisions from the point of view of a teenager.
Press voices:
”Abrahamson knows how to portray culture clashes in a drastic way, and she pushed the boundaries, making you laugh without contributing to a negative view of the Other /…/
It is high and low, told with a great helping of sarcasm and humor, though dark rays of sorrow are mixed in with the high spirits. The story has such flow that I can easily imagine it as a good movie. I read it from the beginning to the end in one sitting and I believe that many, young as old, will do the same.”
Borås Tidning
“The first person narrator Alicja has a Polish mother, a colorful woman who is both visible and loud - according to her daughter, too much so. Her Swedish father takes off for a study tour in the United States in the beginning of the novel. But the family is soon made larger with the arrival of one of Mom’s female cousins who comes to Sweden with her daughter in the hopes of landing a cleaning job and maybe a new husband. With this begins a drama that spins like a tornado through the pages.
Abrahamson parodies and makes fun of prejudices, cliché-like perceptions of people from other cultures and occurrences in time, like Polish craftsmen who work under the table. Parallel with this we learn about the conflict that arises when Alicja falls in love with the boy that her best friend has had a crush on for a long time. This unique novel, in which life’s difficulties are not denied but seen through a laughing mirror, is a much needed counter balance to the dystopias and problem filled stories that have long dominated the publication.”
Svenska Dagbladet
”The book sits on the kitchen table and every time I walk by, it makes me happy. Still, it is difficult to sit down and write about it. Why? That’s just it. I don’t understand what makes me so happy. After all, it is a serious, even rather sad book. About being young. About how much it hurts and how difficult everything is.
I Only Want You to Like Me is a little masterpiece. Its ten stories are braided together so skillfully and beautifully that the plots of the book become one, about all of them, and about living beneath the surface of the grownup world, in a sea green holding place where movements feel sluggish, even as thoughts flutter here and there. Who you are, choices that needs to be made, things to resolve.”
Dagens Nyheter
Rights sold to:
Karisto, Finland
DTV, Germany