“If she’s going through the pearly gates, she damn well ought to suffer on her way there.”
Ann- Helén Laestadius’s Punished (translated from the Swedish by Rachel Willson-Broyles, Scribner 2025 – originally published by Romanus & Selling in 2023) will gut you just as surely and jaggedly as Stolen. I’ve said before that Laestadius reminds me of Backman, only a bit grittier – her “heart hugs” come with a song on the wind, haunting and powerful – it’s the joik – a traditional Sámi way of singing that the children in Punished are not allowed to sing.
Punished is the story of five Sámi children at the “nomad school” , a government-run boarding facility in Sweden in the 1950s. There, they are not allowed to speak their native language, sing their songs, or wear their traditional clothes (except when they need to be paraded around.). For all intents and purposes, they are there to cease being Sámi despite the purported goal being an education tailored to nomadic people. It’s inspired by true events, and it’s unflinching and unapologetic in its presentation. (The Church of Sweden has apologized for its centuries long systematic abuse and repeated trauma to the Indigenous people, but words don’t erase scars.)
The novel flips between the 1950s with the children in the school and the 1980s with the now adults still struggling with the abuse that was inflicted upon them at the school. What unfolds is partly a story of revenge as the evil headmistress has returned to the town, and the children must confront that ghost, but also a story of resilience and finding your way back home.
It’s a hard read, but it’s a read with a heartbeat. It bleeds and weeps, the bruise spreading as you read, but there’s a warmth and a brightness and above all – a voice, a joik, that you’ll hear long after the last page.
Read this book.
A Girl Named Tommi 