Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley
What a great book. Maybe the most beautiful and real book I’ve ever read. Daunis feels so real to me. There’s no way she isn’t real because her struggles: drugs in her community, the way indigenous women are treated by white society, assault, the grasp to get out- those felt so real.
Daunis has just graduated and has decided to stay in her town for college: her grandmother recently had a stroke and her mother needs her. When she gets recruited to help the FBI find someone in her native community making highly addictive meth, her world turns upside down.
This book discusses everything:
Being bi-racial and the gatekeeping from both communities
Modern medicine vs native medicine and the overlapping Venn diagram
Why a red dress is the symbol for missing and murdered indigenous women
So. Much. Hockey, hey.
Co-dependency and it’s pitfalls
Honor and honoring those that were lost, finishing what they started
It’s just so incredible and insightful. I cannot believe this book is a YA, it talks about very hard topics in such a profound and extraordinary way.
Also, so many amazing elders. I am here for the elders and their epic cool-ness.
If I had one criticism, it’s the 21 Jump Street plot-line. That just made me giggle and not take it seriously. -Ford
TRIGGER WARNING: drug use, murder/suicide (on-the-page), rape (on-the-page), physical assault (on-the-page).
