The quick cut: Things get chaotic when two indigenous girls are found dead and the murderer is not found. Four teens take it upon themselves to figure it out.
A real review:
Thank you to Heartdrum for providing the arc for an honest review.
Injustice happens in the world all the time, but what if it was impacting your community? For the Blackfeet reservation, this is a reality when two girls go missing and turn up dead.
Mara used to live in the city until her family moved to the reservation. She's felt like an outsider until she's brought to a traditional Blackfeet giveaway to honor a missing girl. It's the start of a string of events that finds two local girls dead. Who is commiting these crimes and will they ever find the killer?
Indigenous crime is a very real issue, especially missing and murdered indigenous women. It's only made worse by the ignorance of their culture by investigators and the under resourced investigations. This book in a very clever way highlights all these issues. I wish there wasn't so many narrators though because it only distracted from the core story.
Mara is newly thrust into this community and just becoming a part of it. Each narrator had a different relationship to the dead. Seeing them all navigate that while trying to figure out what happened makes for interesting results. I did find that their narrative didn't sound unique enough for each one, which only made it harder to connect to them.
I loved the ending, although it was also heartbreaking.
A mysterious story with a highlight on an important message.
My rating: 3.5 out of 5