The Reindeer Girl

The Reindeer Girl by Holly Webb is a Christmas story for 7 year olds about a girl who falls asleep listening to her great-grandmother and wakes up eighty years in the past.

What happens

Lotta is in Norway for the first time. It is nearly Christmas, her great-grandmother is about to turn ninety, and there is a party being planned with about a hundred relatives at it.

What Lotta really wants to see is the reindeer.

She gets her wish on the way from the airport. Great-uncle Aslak has two of them in a shed and hands her a fistful of food pellets, and they are much bigger up close than she expected.

She also learns why Father Christmas's reindeer must all be girls. The boys lose their antlers in winter. The mothers keep theirs, partly so they can swipe the greedy ones away from the food.

Then there is Oldeforeldre herself, tiny and wrinkled and nearly ninety, with a photo album and a room full of carvings made of reindeer horn.

Her family were Sami herders. She grew up moving with the herd, sleeping in a tent her family packed on to a sledge in the mornings. In one photo she is standing next to a cousin who looks uncannily like Lotta and who was also called Lotta.

You can guess what happens after the party. Lotta wakes up on a pile of furs by a real fire, in a tent, wearing a blue dress, with boots stuffed full of dried grass instead of socks. Everyone knows her. She is the other Lotta now.

What stays with you is how specific it all is. The gingery smell of the biscuits. The candles on the Norwegian tree. Which bits of the reindeer got made into thread.

Your reader will pick up a fair few Norwegian words too, and none of it feels like homework.

A couple of things to have in mind. The reindeer here are food and clothing as well as animals to love, and Oldeforeldre says so plainly, which Lotta finds hard. There is also real danger for the animals once Lotta is back in the past, including an eagle circling the young calves and a mother reindeer who goes missing while her calf still needs her.

If animals in trouble tends to upset your child, that thread runs through a good chunk of the book. If they are the sort who likes knowing how people truly lived, including the hard bits, they will get a lot out of it. There is a quiet, honest passage about Sami children being sent away to school and told not to speak their own language.

What to read next

There is another Christmas book in the library built round somebody else's much older story. In The Night I Met Father Christmas a boy who has started to have doubts stays awake to catch Father Christmas in the act, and ends up being told how the whole thing began, elves and shoe factory and all.