If you want to know what ordinary readers and listeners think about almost any recent Finnish novel published by a major publishing house, the easiest way is to check the star ratings on the biggest audiobook services. The rating is an average of readers’ reviews, and users can also leave a more detailed comment below. The condition, of course, is that they have listened to, read, or at least skimmed the book all the way to the end.
It will hardly come as a surprise that the public often disagrees with the critics.
Milla Härmä’s debut novel Loma (”Holiday”) has received ratings of 3.4 and 3.6 on the two biggest audiobook services. In other words, listeners and e-book readers see it as a three-and-a-half-star book. That is probably a perfectly respectable score, but it is far from the ratings given to the most beloved books.
My guess is that the middling rating is due to the fact that many readers find the protagonist extremely irritating. And irritating she certainly is. But more on that later.
As its title suggests, Loma is about one family’s summer holiday. A mother, a father, and three children travel for a week to a Central European city that strongly resembles Gdańsk. From the very beginning, dark clouds gather over the trip. One of the children has thrown up — surely it isn’t contagious? And the plane will stay in the air, won’t it?
It is actually difficult to define exactly what the book is about. The story is told from the point of view of the mother, whose name is mentioned only in passing; the other characters remain unnamed. The mother is so obsessed with drinking beer that the book can, if one wishes, be read as a portrayal of alcoholism in a middle-class, middle-aged woman.
At the same time, consumption lies at the heart of everything. A city break with children consists almost entirely of buying things, or of wistfully giving them up. In addition to beer, the family buys food, ice cream, entrance tickets, carousel rides, more ice cream, souvenirs, ice cream again, restaurant meals, evening snacks, breakfast, and yet more ice cream. The city is full of capybara products that both the children and the mother are tempted to buy.
In the background, there is a constant, vague horror connected to making choices. This is what makes the protagonist, the mother, so unbearably irritating. She cannot let go of the fear that a mistake is about to happen. Or that a mistake has already been made — but when? What follows is a compulsive need to control everything. Even the smallest sign, such as a disappointed look appearing on a child’s face, signals possible danger.
The father’s role remains unresolved. It is left to the reader to interpret why he has chosen to be as passive as he is.
In this critic’s opinion, Härmä’s debut is a five-star work. It is an unbearable but brilliant portrayal of the nuclear family in the 2020s. In the very final pages, Härmä makes a choice that readers may well disagree about, but as a whole the novel works excellently within its genre.
However, I would not recommend the book as holiday reading for a middle-aged breadwinner. It is best opened only after the trip, or sufficiently well before it.
Milla Härmä: Loma (WSOY 2026)