Reading Skywards – Your Friendly Bookshelf

INFORMATION ABOUT THIS BOOK
Publisher ‏ : ‎Univ Of Minnesota Press
Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 2, 2026
Format: Hardcovers, and ebook
Print length ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
Genre:  Literary Fiction

HOW DID I GET THIS BOOK?

I got this book from NetGalley as an ARC. I chose the book because the cover and the premise were interesting. Also, I follow a reading challenge, and I needed a book that was translated, and also a book that was culturally different from mine. This book seemed to hit all the marks, and I was granted the book after my request.

MY PERSONAL OPINION OF “THE HOME OF THE DROWNED” by Elin Anna Labba

This book was beautiful. From the first few pages, I understood that this book was going to read like poetry in prose. It was tender, rough, sad, with a lot of melancholy, a lot of acceptance, intensely describing a hard life that is lived to the fullest because it has been done before, and it has to be done now, like it will be done in the future.

The book narrates the story of three Sami women. Rávdná, the mother, a widow, was resigned to hard work, but brutally aware of the injustices that the Government was doing to her and her people, every time they dammed the lake and the water rose, drowning all their homes. Aunt Ánne, who is Ravdna’s sister, quietly keeps things running inside the house, keeping all as clean as possible, providing a tender side to their harsh everyday life, and Inga, Ravdna’s daughter, whose life is narrated from her childhood to adulthood.

The three women are different in their strong personalities, their nomadic lifestyle has shown them to be strong and resilient, and their homes and possessions being swallowed by the lake has taught them not to attach, to accept, and move on. It is all written beautifully, the way the lake, the cold weather, always snowing, the reindeer, their homes, their fishing, all is narrated with so much tenderness and at the same time very raw, very real to the harshness that the Sami people endure.

The book does have the political side too. Criticizing throughout the story, the decisions made by the Government without taking into consideration the Sami people, and what they have lost through the years, every time the lake’s water level increases. Receiving little to nothing in monetary compensation, and clearly marginalizing them until their assimilation.

This book was rich in its writing and in its content. It’s a beautiful book written with knowledge and love.

PREMISE OF THE BOOK AS FOUND IN AMAZON / GOODREADS:

Nothing is true, and everything is true; poetry will never hurt more than what has happened. Every summer, Iŋgá, her mother Rávdná, and her Aunt Ánne travel west to their village on the lake. But the summer Iŋgá is thirteen, they arrive to find their home and possessions have disappeared under water, the land flooded by a dam built to supply hydropower to a society that has continually stolen from them.

The Home of the Drowned follows these women’s fortunes over forty years―from 1942 to 1982―as the water their people have lived near for centuries is transformed into a menacing force that threatens all they hold dear. Defying the authorities, Rávdná decides to build a proper house on the lake to replace what was lost, becoming an unlikely activist even as her actions isolate her family from the rest of the community. Meanwhile, Ánne’s health is in decline, and a concerned Iŋgá merely longs to live like everyone else―an impossible wish when the Swedish state is relentlessly drowning her world.

Drawing on her own family’s history of forced relocation and violent colonial dispossession, Elin Anna Labba’s debut novel brings Sámi history to the fore through this intimate story. In poetic prose deftly translated by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, she reveals connections between land, water, and people that hauntingly reverberate with the question: what is it that makes a home?

MY RATING: 5.0

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Elin Anna Labba (Northern Sami: Joná Gusttu Elin Ánná; born 30 November 1980) is a Sámi author and journalist from Sweden. She has won multiple prizes for her first book The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow: The Forced Displacement of the Northern Sámi(Herrarna satte oss hit: om tvångsförflyttningarna i Sverige), which describes the forced migration of the Sámi from Norway to Sweden from 1919 to 1920.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

• The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow: The Forced Displacement of the Northern Sámi