BINGO: the letter “B”
Tis the season for multiple POV books, I guess, as this flips between two interwoven lives and also between timelines.
In the 70s (?) (ish?) the youngest daughter of a Mi’kmaq family goes missing during the annual berry picking season in Maine. Joe, the second youngest, is the last to have seen Ruthie, but despite everyone’s strenuous efforts she remains lost at the end of the season when everyone has to leave and go back to the homestead in Canada. Joe’s story continues through his chapters, picking up in the modern day when he has stage 4 lung cancer and skipping back and forth from present day to the events that have landed him there.
Our other set of chapters follow Norma, the suspiciously brown (‘Italian grandfather’) daughter of a white couple, whose mother suffered multiple miscarriages before miraculously having Norma.
Insofar as I can tell, it’s not meant to be a reveal that Norma is, in fact, the kidnapped Ruthie. The magnitude of the crime committed is made all the worse because the boarding school commission has already come and taken the eldest two members of Joe’s family (Ben and Mae) for an undetermined period of time, before their father manages to get them back on account of being a landowner and therefore having a secure housing situation. As readers you exhale when Ben and Mae don’t go back to the school, only to have their youngest sibling stolen under even less benevolent (????) seeming auspices.
What is anxiety inducing to the extreme — what brought me back to this book over and over — is whether Norma will figure out the truth in time to confront her kidnapper parents or meet her true parents. I’ll admit that a part of me was playing the “they just can’t” card in my head re: the author–i.e., when you’re like, this author doesn’t yet have the credit to have a book end sadly. A debut novel by a First Nations/settler writer writing about a real life tragedy? She has to give her characters a happy ending right? right???
That being said, I found the chapters on Joe to be tiring and a bit trope-y. The Man with Anger Problems Turns to Substances and is a Jerk to the Women in his Life and we’re meant to follow along and, what, empathize? Understand that he believes there’s something dark in his blood because white supremacy told him so, that he needs to bum about aimless until he’s healed through the selfless love of the daughter he abandoned and the mother whose heart had barely survived losing one child? Cry me a river — Hamilton’s popped back up in my minor obsessions feed, and while a lot of that show has aged badly in a “we solved racism yay!” sort of way, Washington’s observation rings true: dying is easy, young man, living is harder. Everyone lost Ruthie, but Joe is the one who fell apart and the one we live through.
That’s a lot of meh words for a book that I overall liked, and that’s a testament to how interesting Norma/Ruthie’s half of the book is. She has vague memories of her life before, bits and pieces that don’t really make sense, and eventually a complicated legacy to parse and live with. Much more interesting, and I’d have read an entire book of her view without hesitation.
Side note, gorgeous cover.