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A review by clemmies
The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
relaxing
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
Cherie Dimaline is a pointed writer. That much is clear in THE MARROW THIEVES alone. She attends her femme perspective while directly focusing on masculinity under American colonialism. The primary relationships are vastly majority masculine, yet the vitality and unrivaled power of femininity and maternal love is underscored by the climax.
Frenchie is an adorably emotional, protective, and loving - if distant - figure for both the reader and his found family. His father figure Miig is the standoud relationship for-sure, with the pure dichotomy of emotional repression and paternal defensiveness under a genocidal state being the primary subtext scoring their journey to protext their family. Miig relents the vitality of emotional avaliablility and vulnerability, yet is necessitated to limit how that is expressed due to the pure cruelty of the situation facing the native population of the Americas in this not-so-speculative fiction.
As Frenchie learns how to protect his crush Rose, while additionally learning not to lose her, Dimaline is teaching the reader of the cultural reality of integrationist schooling for Indigenous American Indians during the period of Manifest Destiny. This banal reality cannot just be *told* to a child, yet they will experience the violence all the same, so storytelling and characterization are utilized to make the reality compartmentalized and more simply understood by an emotional, limited teenage perspective that this novel is aiming for. Yet regardless, through trusting the story, this information will be delineated, creating many new young intellegenistas and prospects of decolonial theory in the process.
Frenchie is an adorably emotional, protective, and loving - if distant - figure for both the reader and his found family. His father figure Miig is the standoud relationship for-sure, with the pure dichotomy of emotional repression and paternal defensiveness under a genocidal state being the primary subtext scoring their journey to protext their family. Miig relents the vitality of emotional avaliablility and vulnerability, yet is necessitated to limit how that is expressed due to the pure cruelty of the situation facing the native population of the Americas in this not-so-speculative fiction.
As Frenchie learns how to protect his crush Rose, while additionally learning not to lose her, Dimaline is teaching the reader of the cultural reality of integrationist schooling for Indigenous American Indians during the period of Manifest Destiny. This banal reality cannot just be *told* to a child, yet they will experience the violence all the same, so storytelling and characterization are utilized to make the reality compartmentalized and more simply understood by an emotional, limited teenage perspective that this novel is aiming for. Yet regardless, through trusting the story, this information will be delineated, creating many new young intellegenistas and prospects of decolonial theory in the process.
Content Warnings
Minor: Sexual assault