Swedish writer Ann-Helén Laestadius’s first fiction for adults opens in a wintry Scandinavian forest as a knife-wielding figure hacks away at a reindeer calf. What makes the scene so ominous is the narrator’s point of view, because watching it all, only partly hidden by the trunk of a pine tree, is a nine-year-old Sami girl named Elsa, to whom the calf belongs.
Laestadius, a journalist with an award-winning YA novel to her name, is herself of Sami and Tornedalian descent, and as she explains in an author note, she draws here on real-life events that have been taking place in the Sami territory of Sápmi for years. In preparation, she read more than 100 police reports about killed and tortured reindeer, none of which, she relates, has led to prosecution.
