I'm back at it, and excited to be writing my new book for girls, Annika At Wilderness Hotel - The Intruder. It too, will be on Amazon Kindle, and lulu.com, like its predecessor, Annika At Wilderness Hotel - The Finnish Spies, with the same list of characters, and at a very reasonable price.

Annika is a girl who, at an early age, 13, was, by her parents, her socio-economic group - Swedish immigrents in the mid-eighteen-hundreds, and by sheer necessity, expected to contribute to the income of her family, the owners and proprietors of Wilderness Hotel. Wilderness Hotel was located by the shores of a huge lake on the northern-most border of Minnesota. Small businesses were the norm, as were farms. Families were close-knit, and family members depended upon each other for survival and economic security. This system, for the most part, worked well.

But Annika was also a girl with spirit, in more ways than one. She was a child who was rescued from one of the Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, or Russian tribes of natives, the Saami, after an accident destroyed her birth-family.

The Saami, or Sami, are the indigenous people who live in the far north of Sweden, Norway, Finland and the Kola Penisula of Russa, or, where I call, the top of those countries. They are northernmost lands that were populated with people who were for the most part, a nomatic people who herded reindeer, (the only peoples who are still legally allowed to do so), coastal fishermen, fur trapers and sheep herders. Sometimes these people are referred to as Lapp, but this word is an insult, because the meaning is that the people wear rags that are/were, dirty and patched.

Annika, a tiny newborn, was saved by her father, a young Swedish military officer and taken home to his young wife. (The circumstances of this unofficial adoption are explained in Annika At Wilderness Hotel - The Finnish Spies.)

Annika does not look like her Swedish family. Some of the situations in the Annika books are attributed to that difference in her appearance, her unusual insights, and her intuition, and account for many of her attitudes and actions. 

The book(s) is/are good for young girls, ages 10 - 13, because of Annika's age, her adoption into a family she does not look like at all, and her adventurous and daring behavior. She gets to be a hero in each book, she surmounts difficult and dangerous situations and comes out victorious. She learns lessons about the importance of honesty, bravery, kindness, differences in people, and how to relate her own position to others in a way that is helpful in understanding herself.

Adventure and mystery books, and books about bravery, are not only for boys, and I hope that young girls who love to read will enjoy this book and my first Annika book, Annika At Wilderness Hotel.