Kari Stai - Selected Title Author
We are happy to present our selected title author Kari Stai. She has written and illustrated The Tribe (original title: Flokken). The book is one of NORLA’s Selected Titles of the spring 2025.
What is your book about?
This book follows Juri, a 10-year-old boy full of energy, thoughts, and emotions. He has a curious and questioning nature, always trying to understand how people and relationships work. He asks himself whether he truly belongs to “the group” or if he’s on the outside looking in, but he has good friends, a mother, and a father. As adolescence approaches, though, everything starts to shift. Bodies are changing—especially girls’. They’re so nice to look at, but how is he supposed to approach them? How many people can he have a crush on at the same time? What can he do when his friend has a threatening stepfather? How can Juri help solve other people’s problems? After all, isn’t that what a true friend should do? Relationships are at the heart of this book—with friends, classmates, teachers, morality, the elderly, family, and, perhaps most importantly, with yourself. Juri finds relationships both demanding and rewarding. He tries to navigate them perfectly, but sometimes, everything goes wrong.
What inspired you to make this book?
The Tribe was inspired by my own curiosity about why humans feel such a deep need to belong, about why being alone for too long makes us vulnerable. Loneliness is still such a taboo in society, and I wanted to tell stories that highlight the experience of feeling both inside and outside of a group. Through Juri, I explored how this can be a fluid process—where you feel like you’re both an insider and an outsider at the same time. I believe everyone experiences this in some way or another, but at Juri’s age, it can feel particularly challenging. This is an age when kids start to truly understand themselves while also feeling pressure to “keep up,” to not be left behind. Sometimes, that means doing things that go against one’s own values just to fit in. Many will do almost anything to avoid being excluded. I hope The Tribe helps show that these feelings are universal, and that no one is truly alone in feeling lonely. At its core, this book is about uncertainty and the search for confidence within oneself.
Read more
See full presentation of the book here
Read more about the author here
See all NORLA’s Selected Titles for the spring 2025 here
