"Go jump in a lake! Bawdy, fantastic, and surprisingly poignant, The Bear Hunter's Daughters is the perfect book for the wildest person in your life. Told with brio and humor, this fable of the seven redhaired sisters settles deep in your bones. I loved it from beginning to end." - Keith Donohue, author of The Girl in the Bog and The Stolen Child
In this funny and unforgettable modern day fairy tale, seven sisters raised in the woods fight to keep their freedom.
Deep in the woods of western Finland, a bear hunter has raised his seven daughters to live off the land and steer clear of the trappings of life in town, like cell phones and a social life outside their family. When on his youngest Elga’s twelfth birthday the hunter is killed by his prey and their mother dies soon thereafter, the sisters are left with unpaid bills and a leaky house.
The tension between sticking to the wild ways their father taught them and submitting to well-meaning townsfolk’s efforts to “help” threatens to divide the seven sisters. The eldest, Johanna, tries to wield control, Elga feels tempted by the pull to education, artist Laura spends all her time dreaming up sculptures and exploring nature—but the sisters' trips to the farmer’s market to sell foraged mushrooms and their free time in their vast forest home bring them together in riotous fun. With evocative language and visceral scene-setting, readers get lost in world they’ve invented together and join the fight to protect it.
Inspired by Aleksis Kivi’s classic Finnish novel Seven Brothers (1870), The Bear Hunter’s Daughters is at once realistic and fantastical, an intensely sensory exploration of our essential bonds both with nature and with one another.