Punished

By Ann-Helén Laestadius

Book Overview

From the internationally bestselling author of the "extraordinary" (Fredrik Backman) novel Stolen comes a harrowing story--inspired by true events--of five Indigenous children forced to attend a government-run boarding school in 1950s Sweden, revealing the emotional scars they carry thirty years later.

In the 1950s near the Arctic Circle, seven-year-olds Jon-Ante, Else-Maj, Nilsa, Marge, and Anne-Risten are taken from their families. As children of S mi reindeer herders, the Swedish state has mandated they attend a "nomad school" where they are forbidden to speak their native language. As the children visit home only sporadically, their parents know little about the abuse they face, much of it at the hands of the housemother, Rita. Those who dare to speak up are silenced.

Thirty years later, the five children have chosen different paths to cope with the past. Else-Maj holds strong in her S mi identity but has turned to religion for comfort, while Anne-Risten now goes by Anne to hide her heritage from friends. Nilsa herds reindeer like his father but harbors a lot of anger, and Jon-Ante struggles with traumatic memories from the school. Then there's Marge, who is about to adopt a daughter from Colombia, but can't help questioning if it's right to take a child from her homeland.

Then suddenly, housemother Rita reappears. Now an old, frail woman claiming to have God on her side, she acts like nothing ever happened. But the five former students have neither forgotten nor forgiven her. As the narrative shifts between each of their perspectives, the novel asks: If you had the chance to punish the person who hurt you as a child, would you?

Based on the author's family story, Punished is a searing novel about loss, memory, cultural erasure, and community that vibrates with righteous rage over one nation's greatest betrayals of its native people.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1668045516
• ISBN13: 9781668045510
• Release Date: February 2025
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 448 Pages
• Weight: 0.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Powerful

I was aware of the residential schools Indigenous children were forced into in the US (Reservation Dogs has an episode on this, if you're interested. It's a good show, check it out!) and Canada but I had no idea such a thing was happening to Sámi children in Sweden. This was an incredible learning opportunity and a springboard for me into dive into learning more about this as whole. This took me such a long time to read because every time I read it, I cried. The things these children went through was heartbreaking and I know conditions in such schools were even more brutal than what was depicted in this story. I can't even begin to fathom having my own language and culture ripped away from me and forced and punished into conforming to someone else's idea of how they think I should be. The only negative for me was it took me an awfully long time to remember to who each character from the 50s was as a child and connect them to their adult counterpart in the 80s. I'm grateful for the opportunity to have read this and expand my learning of other Indigenous cultures I was previously unaware of. I know this is a story that was based off the author's own family's experience and I would recommend this all day every day over T.J. Klune's The House in the Cerulean Sea. It's not a "cozy" story, and it will shatter your heart into a million pieces, but you'll get way more out of it. Thanks to NetGalley, Schniber, and the author for this eARC in exchange for an honest review.