I’ve seen this book around for ages. I wanted to read more Canadian fiction and this is one that caught my eye. The concept is that people stopped dreaming and the Indigenous people were being hunted for their marrow because that would allow people to dream again. It sounded interesting!
But it’s also an award winning book. I do not like award winning books. And this one is no different.
The premise of the book does not play into the book. There’s maybe one full dream sequence, you never find out what happens when you lose the ability to dream, and I don’t know who gets the marrow once it’s extracted. It’s weird that this premise is even there at all because this could have been a fictional account of running from Residential Schools, a thing that I seem to remember learning actually happened, and 95% of the book could have remained nearly identical.
The book very much reads like something I would have read for grade 8 and analyzed chapter by chapter. I think the book ultimately is best read in that way, taken apart to study the symbolism rather than read as a whole. Read all together without those pauses, you realize that there’s no tension and that not a lot happens. They are being chased, but you never see the villains except at the very start and very end. There is no real view of how the world has changed since the world was destroyed and, without that contrast to see how people who can’t dream are different from people who can, you don’t really know why anyone would want their marrow in the first place.
It is interesting to see the Canadian Government as the villain, but that’s also historically accurate. There’s probably a deeper meaning, but I’m not reading books to find the deeper meaning someone else wants me to find.
Overall, I think this wasn’t my thing. It’s a literary book instead of a genre one, and therefore followed different conventions that I’m not that interested in. I know that I don’t like award winning books, and should have probably known better. Still, if it’s your thing, you might like it. It’s Canadian, Indigenous, and it has queer rep that was done pretty well.1
- Except for the ending. Nice, but came out of nowhere. [↩]