Siivola, Reindeer's Year

Did you know that reindeer's lives are about more than just fells and snow? This book is for the little ones in the family and it introduces the most important things in a reindeer's life for each month: from the birth of calves to insect season, from digging for food in the snow to reindeer races. The colourful illustrations are a joy to both young and older readers and the short poems can be read again and again and again and again and again and... The illustrator Ellen-Maarit Juuso is from a small village in the northwestern arm of Finnish Lapland where everything revolves around reindeer herding: feeding the young in the spring and cutting earmarks in the summer. Growing up close to nature and the traditional reindeer herding ways, she is inspired to illustrate stories which combine a love for her home and a deep respect for the northern way of life. The writer Jenny Siivola is the mother of a toddler and she has spent a lot of her childhood with the reindeer herders of Oraniemi, taking care of bottle-fed calves and arguing with her reindeer herder relatives - improving her readiness with words.