I Did Something Bad עשיתי משהו רע follows four women, Israeli ex-pats living in Jersey, who decide that the best way to escape their lives is to drag themselves to Iceland, which sounds glamorous until you remember Iceland is basically stunning scenery wrapped around emotional ice baths.
Each woman hauls a suitcase full of personal issues: marriages with frostbite, stalled careers, family drama, wild children, and the creeping suspicion that adulthood might have been oversold. They travel together, but each one seems privately convinced she is starring in her own solo movie, and the others are slightly inconvenient extras.
The book examines their perspectives as they wander through glaciers, hot springs, and their own messy emotional geography. Iceland doesn't cooperate as expected and instead becomes a handy metaphor for what they are doing: walking on ancient lava while trying to handle loyalty, resentment, and everything they have avoided saying to one another for years.
Kaplan uses the trip as a pressure cooker; the further they get from home, the more present their unfinished business becomes. Secrets eventually surface, tempers flare, and at least one person thinks she did something she labels "really bad," although honestly, by that point, the definition of "bad" feels like a moving target.
So instead of domestic guilt, the book plays with friendship, womanhood, aging, and the spectacularly awkward truth that friends sometimes hurt each other without meaning to, and sometimes by absolutely meaning to. The tone swings between intimate and biting, humorous and painful, and the landscape outside keeps echoing the internal storms.
You get volcanic emotions, geothermal conversations, and the quiet horror of realizing that a vacation cannot actually fix your life, although it might shove a flashlight into all the corners you tried to avoid. Ultimately the novel is less about "who did what" and more about what it means to face yourself while trapped with people who remember every embarrassing thing you ever said.
לא חשבתי שאהנה כל כך. החופשה האידילית נראית בתחילה כספר קליל וזניח אך עד מהרה מתפתחת כאן תעלומה כתובה ביד אמן בשילוב רגעים מותחים כשהאי, הטבע, והפסיכולוגיה מתחילים להשתגע. הספר פשוט נהדר אך עדיין מתוק מדי ולא הולך עד הקצה. החברות, ההגיגים, השיחות, התיאורים, כולם קולחים, מעניינים ומדויקים עד שהקורא מצטרף גם הוא לטיול המטורף.
אפשר היה למתוח את העלילה לגבולות רחוקים יותר, אכזריים יותר, דרמטיים יותר, וליצור כאן באמת יצירת מופת. ספר סבבה שהיה יכול להיות בלתי נשכח.
❤️ 🇮🇱