I started reading this book and found that it was not for me. I didn't want to review a book that I didn't finish.

This book was hard to read at first but as I read more chapters it made more sense. I thought the author did a great job!! I would give this book 4/5.

How nice that a book I was very excited to read lived up to my expectation! Your pal, Candace Siegle, Greedy Reader, has been reading a LOT for a long time, and it is hard to surprise me, but "To Cook a Bear" did.

Set in the far north of what is now Sweden, it's the story of Laestadius, the Lutheran revivalist preacher and naturalist, and the Sami boy he takes under his wing. Most of the story is told through the eyes of Jussi, who, like Laestadius, is part of the indiginous community of Sami reindeer herders who are being destroyed by alcholism. There's a murder in their village, and the pastor does not believe that the young woman's death was the result of a bear attack. We're in the 1850s and Laestadius is inventing investigatory methods.

The translation is excellent and the story flows. I'm sure I'm not alone in knowing little about the far north where people speak Finnish, Norwegian, Sami, and occasionally Swedish. It's remote, but the latest technology does find it's way in in the firm of photographic equipment for Dagurretypes. The pastor makes creative use of this edgy new technology in his investigations.

I highly recommend this novel for its originality and creativing. You will be enchanted.

Deepest thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for access to this wonderful book.

~~Candace Siegle, Greedy Reader

AS with "Postcards" Niemi takes us deep into a Nordic culture which often gets forgotten in the English speaking world. This time it's a more historical take, with the addition of a great botanist, and theologian, as well as a thriller element. Niemi's skill in keeping all these different-sized plates in the air is breathtaking.

This English translation of Swedish novelist Mikael Niemi’s “To Cook a Bear” brings readers into the lives of narrator Jussi, and Laestadius, the brilliant and eccentric preacher who has raised the boy since he fled his Sami village. Together, the two find themselves working to find out who has been praying upon young women in the community. The mystery by itself is an engrossing one, but it is made all the richer by its setting. Mid-1800’s northern Sweden in the midst a Lutheran revivalist movement with a heavy pro-temperance message that is setting off both support and also backlash is a time and place the likes I have never been taken to before by any book, and Niemi (and this book’s translator) did marvelous work transporting me right into the thick of it.