The spaces and places of Northern teenagers in the 1980s young adult novels of Anna-Liisa Haakana

The subject of the study is how the 1980’s youth books of Anna-Liisa Haakana (b. 1937) from Sodankylä Lonely Ykä (My One-Legged Friend and Me) (1980), Girl Number One (1981), The Flower, However (1983), The Inferior Kettunen (1986) and The Love of the Ugly Girl (1989) describe the ways in which young people in remote areas live their places. What kind of means of survival can a young person in a remote area find to be their building block to their identity? In particular, the study examines which particular spaces and places strengthen or weaken the conditions for the growth of girls and boys and the experience of inclusion in the North.

In Haakana's works, the outermost region, as a milieu, restricts young people's leisure opportunities and social relations in a way that gives way to the milieu and the young person's connection and exclusively.

In her works, Haakana describes the deserted countryside from the perspective of the inhabitants left behind. He raises the question of the inward warmth and intolerance of small village comminities as well as the inequality of the northern region to the rest of Finland such as many other northern writers, such as Mukka and Liksom, have made.

The research links Haakana's youth books to the history of Finnish youth literature and highlights the negative and positive aspects of remote areas from the young people's point of view.