Reviews with content warning for Physical abuse - Winter Counts

I don't read crime thrillers all that often, so for the first half of the novel I found myself questioning why I wasn't as engaged as I felt I should've been.

Am I just not into crime thrillers? The jury's still out on that.

Because the second started to pick up in pace and that's when I started to become more emotionally invested.

It was definitely a slow start though. The pacing was slow throughout the first half and it was a lot of establishing the characters and the community. The characterization was fine, but not very deep; I felt like I didn’t really get to know some of the characters the way I’d have liked to. I also had a hard time connecting with the characters because I'm not a very spiritual person, but that's on me. From a learning perspective? I was fascinated and excited to learn about the Lakota way of life, the customs that are followed, and how they interpret the world around them. Getting to hear from a Lakota perspective in Virgil’s character was eye-opening and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I wasn't 100% sold on Marie and Virgil as a couple. It just seemed a little too easy between them because they were overly comfortable with one another. In contrast, Virgil and Tommy’s friendship was great. Even though at times it seemed more like Virgil was using Tommy as an informant, they shared a genuine connection, and Tommy’s levity really did a solid job of offsetting the increasing strife in Virgil’s life.

I appreciated the high level of action as everything went down towards the end, and would definitely recommend this to anyone who wants to read more stories with a focus on Indigenous and First Nations peoples.

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opinionsofawolf's review

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dark emotional fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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kachina's review

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adventurous dark mysterious tense medium-paced

I don’t wanna give this a bad star rating but idk I felt like I had some qualms w this book.

As a fellow white Indigenous (and Oceti Sakowin) relative, I just felt like so much of this book played into strange colonizer stereotypes.

Something in the spirit of it felt...off. I think there’s a lot of nuanced discourse around whiteness and Indigeneity, and a lot of uncomfortable learning, too.

So much of this felt like a white Native pity fest. Not to dismiss the nuances of the particular pain of being ostracized from your own community, I know that pain well, but it feels so centered in this book in a weird way that implicates other non-white or white passing Natives in a way that feels like something an author of this age should’ve grown out of by now.

I also felt like there was some weird lateral oppressive stereotype deployment in terms of how Latinx folks were portrayed but that’s a whole other can of worms.

In all; I wanna support fellow Indigenous creators and writers, but outside of my work this book has really put to the forefront for me how much I don’t think I’ll be reading cishet, white male stories in the future.

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