Fire from the Sky is the beautifully evocative story of Ánte, a young Sámi reindeer herder. Ánte loves his land and herding reindeer; he wants to follow in his father’s footsteps. But as the book begins, he has just realized he is attracted to his long-time good friend, Erik, who has a girlfriend but also seems to reciprocate Ánte’s feelings.

A novel for upper YA readers, Fire from the Sky exquisitely captures the incoherent feelings of yearning and desire that teens in love feel and the confusion they experience in sorting out the mysteries of that attraction. Making things more difficult, Ánte’s confused journey of self-discovery is complicated by his culture’s embedded homophobia, requiring him to reconcile his own sexuality with his deep love for Sámi traditions.

While it is fiction, Fire from the Sky  deals directly with two different kinds of oppression. The first is external, stemming from when one culture stifles an indigenous one. In this case, it’s Sámi by Swedish. The results of this oppression threads through the story, with a book by a lightly fictionalized version of an early 20^th century “racial biologist” as an important element. A short but important author’s afterword notes that these so-called scientists “wanted “to prevent the ‘Swedish race’ from mixing with races they saw as inferior.” If this seems reminiscent of the Nazis, it should: one of the characters in the novel points out that “…the Nazis in Germany were inspired by Swedish racial biologists.”

The second kind of oppression in the novel is internal, from within the culture: the strong bias against being gay. As Ánte struggles with his own growing realization that he is attracted to one of his best friends rather than girls, he also must come to terms with his village’s strident homophobia, exemplified by his own father. And yet Ánte does find sympathetic ears—his grandmother (or Áhkko), his cousin Ida, and ultimately, even his parents.

Fire from the Sky begins with Ánte searching online with a provocative question that encapsulates his struggle: Do homosexual reindeer herders exist? Answering that question proves crucial to his ability to find himself and be true to what he finds.

Fire from the Sky
Written by Moa Backe Åstot
Translated from the Swedish by Eva Apelqvist
ISBN: 9781646142484
2023, Levine Querido

Awards: 2024 Michael L. Printz Honor Book

Reviews: Kirkus Starred Review

You can buy a copy here* or find it at a library.

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Award-winning opera singer Nanette McGuinness is the translator of over 100 books and graphic novels for children and adults from French, Italian, German and Spanish into English, including the much-loved Geronimo Stilton Graphic Novels, as well as Tiki: A Very Ruff Year (nominated for the 2023 Eisner and Harvey Awards) and Alice on the Run: One Child’s Journey Through the Rwandan Civil War (2023 GLLI YA Translated Book Prize Honor Book, 2023 Mosaic Prize winner, 2023 Excellence in Graphic Literature Finalist and 2023 Harvey Award nominee). Accolades have also gone to her translations of Magical History Tour: Vikings and of Magical History Tour: Gandhi (both 2023 Excellence in Graphic Literature Finalists), Luisa: Now and Then (2019 Stonewall Honor Book; 2020 GLLI YA Translated Honor Book; YALSA’s Great Graphic Novels for Teens in 2019) and California Dreamin’: Cass Elliot Before the Mamas & the Papas (2018 Harvey Award; YALSA’s Great Graphic Novels for Teens in 2018).