I thought the structure of this novel seemed compelling; there was a mixture of what looked like poetry, lists, and prose. It is introduced as a novel written in warnings, scrabbled words on the backs of envelopes from a woman who has had enough. It grew old quickly.
Although true to the character Schofield has imagined, I found Bina’s repetitive ramblings tiresome. There is a good story there– but I felt like it wound around itself over and over and nothing new was ever really revealed.
There are no bad books… only books that haven’t found the right reader. I was not the right reader for Bina.
This New York Times Best Seller came highly recommended by friends who had read it, and it did not disappoint!
Owens writes in an elegant prose that transports you to the North Carolina marshlands and surrounds you with the sights and sounds of the southeastern United States. A wildlife scientist herself, Owens layers her tale with precise and deliberate descriptions of nature unfolding through seasons and landscapes.
“And just at that second, the wind picked up, and thousands upon thousands of yellow sycamore leaves broke from their life support and streamed across the sky. Autumn leaves don’t fall; they fly. They take their time and wander on this, their only chance to soar. Reflecting sunlight, they swirled and sailed and fluttered on the wind drafts.”
(Owens, p. 124)
This is a compelling and heart-wrenching coming-of-age story. The central character, Kya, is as complex as she is misunderstood. Kya, or “The Marsh Girl” as she is known by the townspeople who shun, ridicule and exclude her, is hauntingly alone but resolutely determined. She navigates heartbreak, questions how to trust others, and struggles to make sense of how to know and understand love. Interspersed within this beautiful narrative an engrossing murder mystery unravels as we flash back and forward through Kya’s life, wondering at the threads of who might have killed Chase, the town’s handsome quarterback.
This book has it all: a tumultuous family upheaval; a beautiful love story; a fascinating murder mystery, a courtroom drama reminiscent of Atticus Finch, and ethereal prose. An absolute must-read.
Jennifer Mathieu drops us into Vivian Carter’s high school– and her high school looks a lot like high schools do– that’s not fiction. Trust me, I’ve been in high school for more than 20 years!
Vivian is tired of the singular focus on football, and the way it proffers entitlement for its boorish players. She is irritated by a dress code that focuses exclusively on what women wear, how they are targeted and surveyed by adults, and blamed for distracting their male peers. She is annoyed with the pervasive toxic masculinity that normalizes the sexual harassment of women: they yell out sexist comments at the girls (Make me a sandwich!) Which, as Vivian explains, insinuates that women best stay in the kitchen. They wear t-shirts with demeaning slogans (Great legs! When do they open?); play a game of bump n’ grab in the hallways (groping women’s bodies); and play host to a March Madness game where they rank and sort which of the girls is most fuckable.
So, yeah. Vivian is fed up with her small Texas town high school, and she decides to fight back.
Inspired by the momentos she finds in a box of her mother’s labelled: “My Misspent Youth,” Vivian starts a zine called Moxie in which she calls the girls in her school to action.
This book explores what it means to want fair and equal treatment; to feel safe in spaces; to be a good friend and ally; and to use our voices to speak up.
I expect to recommend this one a lot in the fall when I welcome ninth graders to my reading library. If you have young women in your life, give them a little moxie too!
In a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by global warming, Frenchie and his compatriots are on the run from the Recruiters.
Indigenous peoples have the one thing everyone else is missing: the ability to dream.
“We go to the schools and they leach the dreams from where our ancestors hid them, in the honeycombs of slushy marrow buried in our bones. And us? Well, we join our ancestors, hoping we left enough dreams behind for the next generation to stumble across.”
You will be compelled to draw parallels to Canadian Residential Schools, they are mentioned as past markers in the story, but serve to show how when a dominant group wants something– they will stop at nothing to get it. She moves our past into our future– making it impossible to look away.
Surely, readers can draw connections to our present reality and the plausibility and gravity of her story. For me, it brings to mind the environmental degradation caused by Canada’s oil sands and their emissions-intensive extraction process and destructive land use. Canada is also home to 75 percent of the world’s mining companies. And they don’t have a great record around the world. Murders, rapes, and beatings have been reported at mines owned by Canadian companies. They’re not doing so well on the environmental front either. Contamination of water bodies from tailings pond and dam failures has become commonplace. In B.C., wild salmon have been the backbone of Indigenous food systems for millennia. Much more recently, fish farms have begun popping up on the coast. They concentrate hundreds of thousands of fish in floating farms using open net pens. The farms breed pests and diseases like Infectious Salmon Anemia, sea lice, and Piscine Reovirus, and can pass those on to wild populations. Indigenous-led activists have attacked the industry for its effects on wild fish. I would be remiss to not also mention issues of violence against Indigenous women and the violation of Indigenous Peoples’ land rights.
“Indigenous peoples are being forced into long and costly court battles to defend their traditions and ways of life because governments in Canada still refuse to accept the need to work collaboratively with Indigenous peoples on important decisions about environmental protection and resource development,” said Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs. “It’s ironic that the Committee report should come out in the midst of today’s court hearings into the Site C dam, a megaproject approved by the federal and province governments over the objections of First Nations and despite a highly critical environmental assessment.”
UN human rights report shows that Canada is failing Indigenous peoples JOINT PRESS RELEASE PUBLIC STATEMENTS JULY 23, 2015
Dimaline’s novel is not entirely fiction. But it is essential reading.
Cherie Dimaline is a Canadian Métis writer. In The Marrow Thieves, she explores the continued colonial exploitation of Indigenous people and the land. She has received great acclaim for her novel: the Governor General’s Award for English-language children’s literature at the 2017 Governor General’s Awards and the 2017 Kirkus Prize in the young adult literature category. It was also a finalist in the CBC’s 2018 Canada Reads competition, successfully appealing beyond the YA category to adult readers in the competition.
This is a great YA read. What I liked the best was the interspersion of a podcast in which the presenter is trying to make sense of the disappearance of a young girl, Mattie, while Summers simultaneously provides the narrative from Sadie, her sister, who is hollowed by her sister’s death and on a mission to make sense of a botched investigation.
You can actually listen along to the fictional podcast while you read.
Sadie is tormented by the intolerable town she lives in; a mother who never cared for her; men who came in and out of her mother’s life and ruined hers; and the unbearable grief of losing the sister she cared for as her own.
“But love is complicated, it’s messy. It can inspire selflessness, selfishness, our greatest accomplishments and our hardest mistakes. It brings us together and it can just as easily drive us apart.”
