Firekeeper's Daughter

I was so excited for this book and it delivered, but could definitely have used some editing/tightening up. Excited to see what the Obama's will do for the TV adaptation. I appreciated how immersive the reading experience was, and that's credit to Boulley's world building and cultural teachings and sharing, but this book tried to do too much at once and didn't truly move until the last quarter. Daunis is such a fully realized character and there's so much of this book that I'll keep thinking about. Would recommend for upper high school - college - adult.

YA mystery is one of my favorite subgenres, and I thought Boulley's debut novel hit the mark of a good thriller while also having consistent character development and a strong sense of place. You can tell that the author spent years writing and refining this story and I felt fully immersed in Daunis' world, half in and half out of Ojibwe culture. The twists and turns had me reading this book late into the night.

I really enjoyed a lot of the concepts in this book. Angeline Boulley really set out to ground a story in the Native culture that was the most familiar to her – the Ojibwe people specifically of the Sault Ste Marie area of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. There is a very strong sense of place here. It takes about 50 pages to get into the story and not feel like a history and cultural lesson about the region and people and language, but once that happens the story has a propulsive power. I really liked Daunis as the main character, and her connection to her Ojibwe community and her elders, as well as to science and her white family, while not being able to be enrolled as a tribal member. The interplay between community, family, heritage and individual identity was a major theme and I was very drawn to it.The romance is a little unrealistic and honestly just distracting, and I think relatedly the denouement was a little too conspiracy and high drama for me - I think it would have allowed the rest of the book to shine if there was a little more nuance and realism there. Rather than   a 17-year-old controls a bunch of adults and teens, including his mother who is a judge   I think this really undermines that gritty reality of the majority of the book, that domestic violence and addiction are major problems in indigenous communities and this is a very low priority for law enforcement.