Books to Cozy Up To This Autumn Season
Prairie Edge
Conor Kerr
Thriller / Native Author
Métis cousins Isidore “Ezzy” Desjarlais and Grey Ginther have beef with their world. With the latest racist policy rolling out. With whatever new pipeline plowing through traditional territory. With the way a treaty (aka, the army) forced the Papaschase Cree off their home on the Canadian prairie. And, on the other hand, with how Grey’s friends think if they all just went back to the Rez or the settlement, life would be so much better — pretty, like an Instagram ad. Then there’s the warming planet. And their future, which they seem to be screwing up quite well on their own. Being alive can’t be all cribbage, Lucky Lager, and swiping the occasional catalytic converter. One night, the cousins hatch a plan to capture a herd of bison from a nearby national park and release them in downtown Edmonton. They want to be seen, be heard, and to disrupt the settler routines of the city, yet they have no idea what awaits them or the fateful consequences their actions have.
Wandering Stars
Tommy Orange
Historical Fiction / Native Author
Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion prison castle, where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture and identity. A generation later, Star’s son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father’s jailer. Under Pratt’s harsh treatment, Charles clings to moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola, as the two envision a future away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodlines.
Where They Last Saw Her
Marcie R. Rendon
Mystery / Native Author
Quill has lived on the Red Pine reservation in Minnesota her whole life. She knows what happens to people who look like her. Just a girl when Jimmy Sky jumped off the railway bridge and she ran for help, Quill realizes now that she hasn’t ever stopped running. Training for the Boston Marathon out in the woods, she hears a scream. She finds tire tracks and a lone, beaded earring. ••• As Quill closes in on the mystery, someone else disappears. In her quest to find justice for the women of the reservation, she is confronted with the hard truths of their home and the people who purport to serve them. The novel asks searing questions about bystander culture, the reverberations of even one act of crime and the lasting trauma of being invisible.
