Weekend reading
Aug. 1st, 2022 06:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
troisoiseauxRead 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 her best friend is murdered by a meth-dealing ex-boyfriend, the cute new guy on her brother's hockey team turns out to be an undercover cop, and she gets recruited as a confidential informant for a federal drug trafficking investigation. 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.
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Date: 2022-08-02 12:14 pm (UTC)Firekeeper's Daughter is on my to-read list.
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Date: 2022-08-02 09:33 pm (UTC)I have to confess, I felt kind of ??? about it at first, but I shouldn't have doubted Erdrich— she does a brilliant job of pulling all the different threads of the story together.
I definitely recommend Firekeeper's Daughter!