I promise there are enthusiastic book reviews coming, but first we have to get through one more book that I just didn’t enjoy very much. Let’s talk about The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline.
Part of this is my own fault. When I was looking for a banned or challenged book to read and I saw there was one by Cherie Dimaline, I added it to my TBR without paying enough attention to realize this is a book about a teenage boy. An apparently cishet teenage boy. Now don’t get me wrong, I have known some perfectly lovely cishet teenage boys, I just don’t want to spend any time in their heads. And I especially didn’t want to spend time in French’s head when he was thinking about girls, or being jealous about another boy. Miss me with your toxic masculinity, French.
That said, I know there are not a lot of YA books out there with male main characters, especially without a focus on romance. I can see this being a book that teen boys would enjoy, because it involves a teen out in the wilderness trying to survive alongside his found family, and figuring out how to step up and be more mature.
As an adult reader, though, I wanted more from this book. It makes sense that French doesn’t really know a whole lot about what was going on. I had a lot of questions about the plague, which makes people stop dreaming, and the response to it. We’re told that Indigenous people are the only ones who still dream, and we’re only given small glimpses of where other people of color fall into this system of “majority white people hunt down Indigenous people for their dreams.” I’d be really interested, too, to know if this issue is limited to North America (or just Canada?) or is it global, and if so, have Indigenous groups outside North America also retained their ability to dream?
Maybe this is explored more in the second book. The problem is, I just wasn’t hooked enough by the story or characters to want to read a second book.
This is another book that illustrates why I don’t like to give books a star rating. I’m not the intended audience for this book so it’s not really for me to say how many stars it deserves.
TWs and CWs: Violence, death, racism, the mildest references to sex, animal death in the context of hunting for food.
Source and Format: I borrowed the ebook from Sno-Isle Libraries.
Reading Challenge Prompts
Nook & Cranny (Card 1): Banned & Challenged Books. According to pen.org, The Marrow Thieves was banned in at least four districts in Florida. That article doesn’t get into the reasons why, but I found that some parents in Bozeman, Montana, objected to it being required reading for 9th graders: “Keeping this book in the curriculum fosters religious bias towards the church and the Catholic students who attend district schools. By keeping this book in the curriculum, you’re willing to tolerate the presence of poison,” said the Gallatin High mom. “You’re willing for students’ minds to be poisoned by the sophistry of Canadian history. A characterization of religious as murderers, depictions of Catholics as henchmen for Indian genocide, linguistic rot, the sexualization of minors.”
This is of course ridiculous. An Indigenous author has every right to write a book that discusses the residential schools, and the sexualization here is, as mentioned above, pretty minor. Makeouts, basically.
Book Riot: Read a banned book and complete a task on Book Riot’s How to Fight Book Bans guides. I’ve been doing anti-book-banning tasks all year, including donating to EveryLibrary, supporting our local Friends of the Library, writing positive notes to our local library when I see a cool diverse display, etc. Book Riot also highlights the importance of voting, and while there weren’t any issues directly related to book banning on this year’s ballot, I did vote against the school board candidate who was campaigning on putting more cops in our schools. I’m not saying he would have been a book banner, but I am saying it wouldn’t have surprised me (he was trounced, thankfully). Remember, even if you don’t have kids, it’s important to keep an eye on what’s happening with your school district elections!
Reading Challenge Progress
Nook & Cranny (Card 1): 20 of 25, 4 bingos.
Nook & Cranny (Card 2): 24 of 25, 9 bingos.
Book Riot: 20 of 24.
Physical TBR: 11 of 12.
World of Whimm: 23 of 24, 8 bingos.