Book Club Wednesday's Featured Books - 4/24/24 - Stolen and Swede Hollow
Two great tales of family struggles.
Stolen -
Ann-Helen Laestadius
Translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles
On a winter day north of the Arctic Circle, nine-year-old Elsa—daughter of Sámi reindeer herders—sees a man brutally kill her beloved reindeer calf and threaten her into silence. When her father takes her to report the crime, local police tell them that there is nothing they can do about these “stolen” animals. Killings like these are classified as theft in the reports that continue to pile up, uninvestigated. But reindeer are not just the Sámi’s livelihood, they also hold spiritual significance; attacking a reindeer is an attack on the culture itself.
Ten years later, hatred and threats against the Sámi keep escalating, and more reindeer are tortured and killed in Elsa’s community. Finally, she’s had enough and decides to push back on the apathetic police force. The hunter comes after her this time, leading to a catastrophic final confrontation.
Based on real events, Ann-Helén Laestadius’s award-winning novel Stolen is part coming-of-age story, part love song to a disappearing natural world, and part electrifying countdown to a dramatic resolution—a searing depiction of a forgotten part of Sweden.
Ann-Helén Laestadius is an author and journalist from Kiruna, Sweden. She is Sámi and of Tornedalian descent, two of Sweden’s national minorities. In 2016, Laestadius was awarded the prestigious August Prize for Best Young Adult and Children’s Novel for Ten Past One, for which she was also awarded Norrland’s Literature Prize. Stolen is her first adult novel and was named Sweden’s Book of the Year.
Swede Hollow -
Ola Larsmo
A riveting family saga immersed in the gritty, dark side of Swedish immigrant life in America in the early twentieth century
Gustaf and Anna Klar and their three children dream of starting over when they leave Sweden for New York, finally settling in a cluster of rough-hewn shacks in a deep, wooded ravine on the edge of St. Paul, Minnesota. This haunting story of a real place echoes the larger challenges of immigration in the twentieth century and today.