“When someone dies, everything about them becomes past tense. Except for the grief. Grief stays in the present.”
“Love is a promise. And promises you don’t keep are the worst lies of all.”
“My nose twitches at a greasy sweetness. Familiar. Vanilla and mineral oil. WD-40. Someone used it to clean the gun. More scents: pine, damp moss, skunky sweat, and cat pee… But then terror grips my heart again. The gun. Back to my face. Mom. She won’t survive my death. One bullet will kill us both… I am thinking of my mother when the blast changes everything.”
Angeline Boulley’s debut, Firekeeper’s Daughter (Henry Holt 2021), is Beartown meets Legendborn meets Demon Copperhead. As such, it’s no one wonder it was also a top read for me. With Legendborn’s angry teenage grief, Demon’s drugs and shattered communities, and Beartown’s us vs. them mentality, hockey, and crime, this heart hug of novel hit all my soft spots and made my eyes burn. I know I’m late to the game, but this was a phenomenal debut.
Daunis Fontaine “began as a secret, and then a scandal” is biracial, with an Ojibwe father whose name was left off her birth certificate and a fragile white mother from an affluent family who has never quite recovered from the events that transpired when she became pregnant at 16. Her half-brother, Levi, carries her father’s name and it was Levi’s mother who received all the things her mother had been promised. The first man to break Daunis’s heart was her father.
Daunis walks between the two worlds, not quite belonging to either. When her grandmother becomes ill, she alters her plans so that she can attend college closer to home. When tragedy strikes and she witnesses the murder of her best friend, she finds herself elbows deep as a CI for the FBI, working closely with the handsome Cherokee posing as a high school hockey player, as they fight against time to figure out where the meth is coming from and who is responsible.
With the bodies and secrets piling up, Daunis walks a line of helping while still protecting her heart, her family, and her people. Channeling the strength and courage as both an Anishinaabe kwe and her own mother’s daughter, Daunis is a voice to be reckoned with.
Read this novel.
A Girl Named Tommi 