Weekend reading
Aug. 1st, 2022 06:46 pmRead Firekeeper's Daughter by Angeline Boulley, a YA novel about an 18-year-old girl in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, trying to find her place in the different worlds she inherited from her Ojibwe father and French-American mother, that takes a sharp left turn a few chapters in when ( spoilers. ) Even with this wild twist, and subsequent crime-thriller and fake-dating-with-real-feelings plot, it's a deeply heartfelt, and heartbreaking, novel about grief and belonging and injustice, and a love letter to Ojibwe culture and also hockey.
Read Louise Erdrich's LaRose, which is also a novel about grief set in an Ojibwe community, although in North Dakota rather than Michigan. It's a story with a lot of moving parts - two families are torn apart and brought together by the accidental death of one young boy and the decision to share custody of another, a long-festering grudge coalesces into a plan of revenge, a priest pines for a married woman, and the U.S. moves towards war in Iraq; all of this is interwoven with the history of several generations of Ojibwe women named LaRose - but it all fits together as neatly as the gears in a watch, no detail without narrative pay-off.
Read Louise Erdrich's LaRose, which is also a novel about grief set in an Ojibwe community, although in North Dakota rather than Michigan. It's a story with a lot of moving parts - two families are torn apart and brought together by the accidental death of one young boy and the decision to share custody of another, a long-festering grudge coalesces into a plan of revenge, a priest pines for a married woman, and the U.S. moves towards war in Iraq; all of this is interwoven with the history of several generations of Ojibwe women named LaRose - but it all fits together as neatly as the gears in a watch, no detail without narrative pay-off.