Another week another attempt at reading more Canadian books! Unlike last week, this one is not, as far as I know, something that won awards, so I went into it pretty hopeful that I’d like it a lot more. And I did!
Strangers follows Cole, a teenager who had moved away from Wounded Sky First Nation to live in Winnipeg some time after a school fire killed a lot of people. He’s tricked back by Coyote, calling himself Choch, to come back to find out that the small town still resents him for not saving more people from the fire when he was seven years old.1 With an illness spreading through the community and several of his old classmates being murdered one by one, Cole has to figure out what’s going on.
The story is a lot of fun. It’s complicated in that there are a lot of moving parts that get revealed slowly throughout the story, but I was never lost at any point and enjoyed finding out what was coming next and trying to put together what was going along with the leads. And in the end, I found that there were enough loose ends that I was intrigued by to consider continuing the trilogy.
I particularly liked the representation of anxiety and mental health. It felt accurate to my own experience, and it was nice to see it acting up at not-plot-relevant moments as well.
Although. This paperback. I need to make some mention of the way the pages are cut on the paperback because I hate it. If your pages look like this:
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\then just don’t. It’s so annoying to flip. Not only that, but they shed little bits of paper, which makes this all so unnecessary.
Overall, though, the story is a lot of fun and it’s definitely worth checking out. It’s Canadian, got some queer content, mental health representation, and fantasy elements that aren’t incredibly western, which is really nice to see.
- This is not a superhero universe, these people are all assholes. [↩]