Oh, Per Petterson. This was recommended to me by a friend – a friend who said that it was his favorite, even over Out Stealing Horses. To be 100% honest, I never finished Out Stealing Horses. So I thought I’d check this one out. And I flew through it in a morning. I have a huge soft spot for characters who love books. They could be pot-smoking, beer-drinking, fisticuffians and secretly read Kerouac and obscure Jack London titles and I will be in love. And so that is how I felt about Audun – the hero of this book. We follow him through five years of his life – 13 to 18 – and you can kind of imagine the type of story it is. His father was an alcoholic and left them a long time ago, his sister ran off with a man that Audun suspects beats her, his younger brother drowned. His mother works and struggles and his friends are dealing with similarly heavy things. It’s Fine by Me follows Audun as he follows a path that (he hopes) will break the downward spiral of his family.