Popular Music from Vittula / Mikael Niemi / 2003 / 237pp

This book was pretty OK, not as great as I expected given the number of awards it won according to the jacket copy. It's a pretty decent growing-up story, has some nice fantastical elements which make it work out well (a kid hides from his captors in an abandoned boiler, no one finds him for years, until he gets big enough to physically break apart the boiler and free himself-- nice adolescence allegory and advances the story in the novel as well!) and is pretty enjoyable. It's imbued with a wistfulness that makes it a little bit of a bummer overall, though.