The End Of Drum-Time by Hanna Pylvainen

 

The time is 1851, the location a remote Scandinavian village.  Only two types of people live here.  The Sami tribes have lived here forever, their reindeer herds everything to them.  They live on reindeer meat and milk, trade the reindeer for the few things they cannot make themselves and travel with the reindeer so that the herd always has grazing.  The lands outside the village are their winter grazing grounds. 

The other inhabitants are those who have come to 'civilize' the tribes, but really to fence in their land and try to make the tribe people more like them.  The village they live in has a few houses, a church and a store.  Mad Lasse is a Lutheran minister who has come to save the Sammi people.  He has two marriage-aged daughters, a son and then a clutch of younger people.  

Willa is one of those daughters.  She despises her life and wants something more.  That something more turns out to be Ivvar, one of the Sami herdsmen.  The two fall in love and when the Sami make their annual pilgrimage in the summer to the coastal grazing grounds, Willa runs away from home and becomes a couple with Ivvar 

The Lutheran church decides that Lasse has gotten out of church bounds and transfers him to another parish.  The uncle of the storekeeper comes to replace Lasse in the church and he is a brutal minister, striking the congregation if they are not attentive and fining those who don't attend.  Something must come to a head with the opposing groups of people and it does in a violence-filled night.  

Hanna Pylvainen is an American author.  This novel was a a finalist for the National Book Award.  The research Pylvainen did for the novel shines through on every page as she transports the reader to the remote Swedish tundra.  The reader will learn about the tribal life of the Sami people and the damage that drinking alcohol did to their lives.  The clash of cultures will inevitably bring an end to the life the Sami people have known, as their opposition has the money and government with which to fence in the land and change the way of life of those who went before.  This book is recommended for readers of historical fiction.