The End of Drum-Time - Hanna Pylvainen - 5 stars

[Robin P]

This book got a lot of hype and nominations and I think it deserves them. It is an impressive evocation of a time, place, and culture - the Sami people of northern Scandinavia in 1851. A book like this reminds me how similar good historical fiction is to good fantasy. Authors must do "world-building" without annoying info dumps or fake conversations, and without adding their modern interpretation. The food, clothing, social life, and spiritual life all are new to us. And yet, we recognize human elements of love, loyalty, anger, determination. This story shares a lot with tales of indigenous people around the world and their conflicts with "civilizing", mostly Christian colonizers. With its many descriptions of winter, it turned out to be a great book to read during a heat wave!

[Joy D]

So glad to see you loved it too! It was one of my 5-star reads in 2023.

[SouthWestZippy]

Great review. I am adding to my TBR mountain, it sounds like my type of book.

[Booknblues]

So glad you liked it, Robin.
It made my best of list the year I read it.

You nailed it when you said it had a lot of world building, as I remember feeling disoriented at the start of the book and it took a while for it to clarify.

[Robin P]

Booknblues wrote: "So glad you liked it, Robin.
It made my best of list the year I read it.

You nailed it when you said it had a lot of world building, as I remember feeling disoriented at the start of the book and ..."

I love feeling disoriented, as if I was just dropped there. Very few authors do that well, a couple are Hilary Mantel and Dorothy Dunnett. In this book, I liked how some words were never translated and some mystical happenings never explained.