The Firekeeper's Daughter by Angeline Boulley

Firekeeper’s Daughter is an stunning debut novel by Angeline Boulley about identity, heritage, community, and strength.

18-year-old Daunis lives with her mother in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. She caused a bit of a local scandal upon her arrival as her mother was the underage daughter of a wealthy white family in town and her late father was a promising hockey player from the nearby Ojibwe reservation who married another girl and got her pregnant before Daunis was even born. Being of mixed heritage, she struggles with feelings of not fitting in; although she has strong ties to both communities, she doesn’t feel fully accepted by either. Following her uncle’s recent death of an overdose and her grandmother’s stroke, she has put her plans to study medicine at university on hold to stay in town and support her fragile mother while they heal. 

When Daunis witnesses a shocking murder, she gets swept up in an ongoing undercover drug investigation and agrees to become a confidential informant for the FBI. In doing so, she is forced to look closely at those around her and consider what she’s willing to risk in order to protect her community. 

An Indigenous woman herself, Angeline Boulley tells the story with great reverence for the Ojibwe culture and its traditions and lets it permeate the fabric of the story. She touches on some heavy themes throughout the book such as murder, drug use, and sexual violence against women, however she weaves it into a larger, compelling narrative about identity, community, friendship, and resilience, which is beautifully written. 

I tore through this book in under 24 hours – once I got into it, I couldn’t put it down. Although there were some heavy subject matters, I appreciate that Boulley didn’t shy away from issues facing many Native Americans, especially as she also focusses on how the Ojibwe community deals with the trauma collectively and processes it to move forward.

Happy reading!

Christine Ebert

RESERVE YOUR COPY OF The Firekeeper’s Daughter

A few weeks ago, I was in my parents’ courtyard on a really beautiful, sunny afternoon. Everything was warm, bright, and quiet, and all I wanted to do was find a really lovely book with a good story that wasn’t too serious or heavy. I stumbled upon Neil Gaiman’s ‘Norse Mythology’ and it turned out to be perfect.

Gaiman is a wonderful storyteller and boils the many strange stories of Norse mythology down to some choice tales that he tells with humor and whimsy. If you already know quite a bit about the subject, this may not be the book for you. But, if like me, you are relatively unfamiliar, this is the perfect introduction.

For the most part, it reads like several stories that are linked but happening independently of one another, so it’s really easy to read a chapter and feel like you’ve gotten an awesome short story out of it.

Perfect for leisurely Sunday afternoons in the sunshine.

Happy reading!

Emma

RESERVE YOUR COPY OF Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman

This novel, translated from Japanese, follows Natsuko, a writer in Tokyo who is uncertain of the future, her freedom, and motherhood. Does the natural imperative of the female body –breasts and eggs – provide Natsuko with her freedom, or is there another type of freedom she is looking for?

Throughout the novel we see other women around Natsuko: her own mother, the embodiment of working-class womanhood, instills ideas of self-sacrifice and motherhood in Natsuko, her sister Makiko who is so disenchanted by her aging body and wants to get her breasts done, her niece Midoriko who is terrified of her developing body and therefore never speaks, her friend Rie who seems to feel imprisoned and duty bound by her family life, Rika who loves her single motherhood, and Sengawa who is devoted to her work. In particular, Yuriko and Aizawa who are born to mothers who have used sperm banks, and the ways in which these experiences have affected them. 

All of these characters and stories work to paint an intimate portrait of motherhood, birth, the female body, freedom, and the difficult choices that many women face. 

Happy Reading!

Emma

RESERVE YOUR COPY OF Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami

I have never had the pleasure of seeing the work of ceramic artist Edmund de Waal in person, but while reading his latest book ‘Letters to Camondo’, with its slow, deliberate, beautiful prose, its sensibility and sensitivity to people, places and subject matter, I couldn’t help but think that this must be the way de Waal works as he sits at his wheel, reflecting, creating.

‘Letters to Camondo’ tells the story of Count Moïse de Camondo, born in Constantinople in 1860, and moved to Paris at a young age. This is the story of a man and his vast art collection; the story of the house he built and the life he lived in fin de siecle Paris, a time of “talk and food and porcelain and politesse and civilité and everything possible.”

It is also the story of a man who loses his only son in World War I and decides to memorialize him by dedicating his home and his collection to him. Finally, and just like de Waal’s first book, ‘The Hare with Amber Eyes’, this is also the story of the treatment of the European Jews.

In gratitude to what Moïse de Camondo believes France has done for the Jewish people, he turns his home into a museum and donates it and the collection to the French state, only to see the French government repay his generosity by sending his daughter and her family to their deaths in concentration camps in 1942. 

The book is beautifully written as imaginary letters from de Waal to Camondo; letters that are based on extensive research and a wealth of information stored at and by Camondo himself. The letters are interspersed by lovely photographs of the house, the family and collection and the telling of life in the company of Proust, Manet and Renoir and deftly juxtaposed with the register-like chronicling of the events and treatment of the Jewish families in Paris from 1936 to Beatrice’s death in Auschwitz in1945 at the age of fifty. 

While the book can absolutely be read on its own, it is beneficial to have read de Waal’s wonderful first memoir ‘The Hare with Amber Eyes’ as it sets the scene and creates an extra framework for truly appreciating the book.

‘Letters to Camondo’ is a wonderful meditation on memory, beauty, collection and dispersement, subjects that de Waal often reflects upon in his pottery. Later this year, De Waal will be the first living artist to have his work displayed at the Musée Nissim de Camondo. What an experience it would be to see these works in this extraordinary building with its extraordinary history.

Happy Reading!

Isabella

RESERVE YOUR COPY OF Letter to Camondo by Edmund de Waal