Punished

Laestadius (Stolen) draws on her mother’s real-life experience at a “nomad” school in the Arctic Circle for a heartrending narrative of five Indigenous Sami children forcibly sent to boarding school by the Swedish state in the 1950s. Else-Maj, Jon-Ante, Anne-Risten, Marge, and Nilsa unhappily leave their reindeer-herding families for the government-run school, where they’re malnourished and punished by Rita, the sadistic Swedish “housemother,” for speaking in their native language. As adults in the mid-’80s, the five struggle to bury what happened to them—Anne-Risten hides her heritage from friends, Jon-Ante is permanently injured from the time when Rita broke his finger, and Marge is plagued with doubts as she adopts a Colombian child. After Else-Maj recognizes Rita, now an elderly woman, at a church service, and home health aides Anne-Risten and Marge are assigned to care for her, word spreads to Jon-Ante and Nilsa. As each of the former students grapples with their desire for revenge, a former maid at the school urges them to break the silence that still shrouds what happened there. Laestadius offsets the slow pacing with a sympathetic rendering of the haunted adults as well as richly detailed descriptions of Sami communal life. This moving tale shines an important spotlight on a story little-known to most American readers. (Feb.)