Ah, it’s summer, you’re fourteen and in love… isn’t that perfect?
Except it’s 1986, and Chernobyl just exploded.
Except the girl you’re in love with is having a hard time.
Except you’re a girl too, and your parents are absolutely NOT happy.
Light, light, light shines from her, the girl you’re in love with. But the darkness is not far behind.
I love Vilja-Tuulia Huotarinen’s poetry, and Valoa valoa valoa (Karisto 2011, new edition Otava 2025) did not disappoint. A rural setting, generations of women under one roof, love and death entwined, and other themes from her poems resonated in this YA paperback.
Mariia, the protagonist narrator, addresses you, DEAR READERS! directly. She turns the conventional writing advice to budding novelists on its head. I’m three years younger than the heroines, and lived much further west of that reactor, but I remember the fear. And the references to teenagerdom in the eighties, and to facing death too young, ring true. As do the utter, all-consuming totality of being in love for the first time. And the inability of the adults to even realize what’s going on, let alone do anything about it.
Read some of Owen Whitesman’s sample translation and see why he loved the book. As he says, it’s “a beautiful thing to read. It feels true to life.” Watch the trailer for the 2023 movie. But read the whole book? If you don’t read in Finnish or Swedish, you can’t, yet. It’s waiting for translation. Has its time now come?
Translator, editor, writer, reader
found in translation 
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