Author: Tanya

For some reason, I went on a spree of ordering a bunch of books that weren’t out yet. Pre-orders! Pre-orders and their campaigns! ((It’s because I’m thinking about doing one myself, tbh)) And this one was one I actually just missed the campaign for, but I still got the book. Let’s check out some more middle grade, right?

Curse of the Night Witch is the story of Tor, a boy who was born with an emblem marking his as a leader. He wants nothing more than to escape this fate and pursue his actual dreams, and so wishes for something else. What he gets instead is a curse that will kill him and, along with his friends, he must find the Night Witch to lift the curse.

This is a middle grade quest book, two things I kept forgetting while I was reading it but two things that it is good at. The main characters are twelve, and Tor in particular does act like it. He starts out only caring about himself and his problems, but gradually comes to think about other people as well. And, given that they’re moving to a new location every chapter or two, he has a lot of opportunities to grow and change.

Given that I haven’t read a lot of quest narratives in recent years, so I kept expecting some of the events to come back around somehow. When it didn’t, I had to remind myself that these are different genre conventions I’m working with and I needed to by a bit more flexible with what was happening.

Overall, it was an entertaining read! I would probably recommend it for a younger audience than myself, which is always great to say about a book intended for a young audience. Definitely check it out, or get it for that younger person in your life!

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. ((This is not a superhero universe, these people are all assholes.)) 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.

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. ((Except for the ending. Nice, but came out of nowhere.))