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by Moa Backe Åstot
Vilda takes life as it comes, talking for hours about everything and nothing with her best friend, Alma.
It's never been a big deal to Vilda that her mother's side of the family is Sámi and her father's is Swedish, but as summer vacation starts, she wants to know more about her indigenous roots-and she's looking forward to her beloved grandfather, Áddjá, teaching her the Sámi language.
Then Áddjá has a fatal heart attack and, overnight, Vilda loses not only a person she loves most in the world, but a crucial link to her history and identity. It's disorienting in ways deep and superficial: she doesn't know what to wear, what to say, or how Alma and her friends should react. And all this comes while her body is changing, and she's swamped by confusing thoughts and feelings about an older boy she meets at her grandfather's funeral.
Feeling whole seems impossibly hard to reach.
Butterfly Heart is a tender, heartwarming story about love, grief, and the right to define who you are.
Kirkus finalists announced!
...shersweekly.com/9781632063700 John the Skeleton by Triinu Laan, illustrated by Marja-Liisa Plats, trans. by Adam Cullen (Restless/Yonder) Young Adult Butterfly Heart by Moa Backe Åstot, trans. by Agnes Broomé (Levine Querido) https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780593480069 Death in the Jungle : Murder, Betrayal and the Lost Dream of...
-kim.kovacs
"Limns the volatile peaks and valleys and emotional quicksand of adolescence with compassion and wry humor." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
This information about Butterfly Heart was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Moa Backe Åstot, born in 1998 in Malmberget, is Sami and a reindeer owner. She has studied creative writing at Umeå University and Jakobsberg Folk School's well-regarded creative writing program. She has received a number of awards for her writing, among them one from Sveriges Radio in 2018 for her short story, "A Small Red Drop." She lives in Jokkmokk. Fire From the Sky is her debut novel.
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