The Marrow Thieves, by Cherie Dimaline (Dancing Cat Books 2017)
First line: “Mitch was smiling so big his back teeth shone in the soft light of the solar-powered lamp we’d scavenged from someone’s shed.”
In honor of Native American Heritage Month, I had a couple of books by indigenous authors on my stack last month, The Marrow Thieves being one of them. I went into this one mostly blind, knowing only that it was a YA dystopian novel in which most people in the world had stopped dreaming, except for the indigenous populations in North America, and the government found they could use their bone marrow to somehow extract the ability to dream. The science of the premise was unclear, and I have to say, it didn’t clear up a whole lot within the novel itself, but honestly, when does the science have to make sense for white supremacy to do whatever it wants to do?
On its surface, The Marrow Thieves is another excellent addition to the YA dystopian cannon, with a wild near future setting, a group of kids running for survival, and a big bad government hunting them down. It fits in easily with the Divergents and Hunger Gameses and all the rest that teens (and the rest of us) gobbled down in the past decade. But what I found so compelling about this novel was its storytelling — both the author’s and the characters’ storytelling. The reader learns the backgrounds of each of the characters in this hodge-podge found family of wanderers through the stories they share with each other, and they’re layered together to build a bigger picture that eventually reveals its connections. Often these stories are heartbreaking, devastating even, and that pain is shared among the members of the group. In a culture that so values oral wisdom sharing, we also see the consequences of losing language, as happened — and is still happening — all too often both here in the U.S. and in Canada, as a result of cultural genocide.
This novel was darker and more intense than I was expecting, but also more tender. It’s about persecution and the reckless murder of a culture, but also about the survival of one.
She Can't Stop Reading 