You really need to be sitting somewhere warm when you read this as it is set in Scandinavia, just north of the Arctic Circle, and the cold seems to creep from the pages all through your body. Elsa is a member of the Sami community who are Indigenous people making a living by herding reindeer. At the start of the book she is only nine years old, and alone when she witnesses a local man poaching reindeer, and she sees him standing over the dead body of a calf she had been given to raise herself. The man threatens to harm her if she says anything to anyone, and from then on she spends her days looking over her shoulder and living in fear of meeting him again. The book came about because the author wanted to capture the challenges that face the Sami in their everyday life, and how difficult it is to maintain their traditional methods of herding and to keep their culture alive. As with Indigenous populations the world over, the Sami have become something of...