Release date is 2026-02-07

Credits: Anna Siren and Tapio Riikonen

"Hota-Leenan poika" by Pentti Haanpää is a novel written in the early 20th century. It portrays the rough, work-bound upbringing of Taneli Hotakka in rural Finland, where scarcity, backbreaking chores, folk healing, and stern piety shape a boy’s path to manhood. The tone blends clear-eyed realism with sharp, sometimes wry observation of village life and its customs.

The opening of the novel contrasts the old countryside with the present, then settles at the small Hotakka farm where tireless Hota‑Leena bears and raises Taneli amid poverty and unending chores. Taneli’s childhood mixes work and mischief—collecting pig fodder, swimming, and stealing a ruoti man’s liquor with the solemn Närhi‑Iikka—before beatings and winter hardships nudge him toward hired work at Kivitalo. A fall while tarring the parsonage sends him bleeding by night to Syinmaa’s famed blind healer, whose eerie household of cripples and madmen, loitsus, and staged terrors (with the jealous helper Hallelujaa‑Aatami) fascinates the boy; the healer even hints at taking him as an apprentice. Hota‑Leena rescues him, purges the “unclean” salves, and returns him to service, where years of labor follow, colored by Kivitalo’s comic and harsh vignettes (the prankish Leviämaa, the Harri brothers, a pious yet ridiculous elder) and, finally, the surge of revivalist meetings that fill the farmhouse with tears, sermons, and early-morning work all the same. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Originally published: Helsinki: Kustannusosakeyhtiö Kansanvalta, 1929