Punchy debut dissecting indigenous identity through a lens of gen Z.
Author: Iida Aikio
Finnish original: Muoviaurinko
Publisher: Kosmos, 2026
Genre: Literary fiction
Number of pages: 258 pp.
Reading material: Finnish original, English sample
a couple of months back i’d posted a ‘10 facts about me’ thing on there, and fact number 6 was ‘i’m like, some kind of sámi’. and still i didn’t get that i’m not exactly white. duh.
When her grandmother, áhkkun, moves into assisted living, Kaisla has to go home for the first time since she left for university. The return is not easy. By day there is a family history that is hers and also somehow not: like her mother’s gákti, the traditional Sámi dress, familiar but cut to someone else’s measurements. By night she escapes into her laptop, onto a dress-up avatar site where you build a girl from scratch, style her, and rate other people’s choices. Online the range of available identities looks infinite. It is, at least on the surface.
Plastic Sun is a debut about being indigenous and twenty-two on the internet – about inheritance that doesn’t fit, a homeland you can leave but not put down, and the specific vertigo of discovering your own ethnicity in a listicle you wrote yourself. Iida Aikio writes Gen Z from the inside rather than about it: the lowercase, the irony held up as a shield, the sincerity that keeps getting through anyway.
“A powerful and accomplished coming-of-age novel.” –Satakunnan kansa
newspaper
“[Plastic Sun] skilfully combines the playfulness of the virtual world, with its game characters, and the aspirations of indigenous peoples to preserve their identity.”–Kaleva newspaper
About the author:
Iida Aikio