And, while the book is full of sorrow and loss, it’s also full of hope. Everything from the importance of oral storytelling to language itself is intrinsic to this story. Despite being set in a fantastical future, the book is very much about the experience of being a native in Canada. Reading this was a unique experience for me because, geographically, the story is set in the area I call home, but the story itself is about a community I am not a part of. The book carefully and thoughtfully evokes the actual historical atrocities indigenous people have faced in Canada, building on them to create a new heartbreaking reality for the characters. In an effort to create a cure, indigenous peoples are being hunted, captured and brutally experimented on. Unless, that is, you’re an indigenous person. We learn that in this future, the world has undergone multiple disasters, including a pandemic that wiped out people’s ability to dream in their sleep. It follows Frenchie, a Metis boy roughing the post-apocalypse Canadian wilderness. This is not at all your typical YA Dystopia. Flash forward 6 months I picked it back up, started over, and this time, I was really taken with it.
When I first started reading it, I wasn’t in the right head space for it, and after reading the book’s one rape scene - I had to put it down. This book was gifted to me by a friend who never strikes out with her book choices for me. Though the events are not described in great detail, they can still be difficult to read This book contains some violence and a rape.
A book from outside my culture / community.Genres: YA / Dystopia / Fantasy / Literature Driven to flight, a fifteen-year-old and his companions struggle for survival, attempt to reunite with loved ones and take refuge from the “recruiters” who seek them out to bring them to the marrow-stealing “factories.” But getting the marrow, and dreams, means death for the unwilling donors. The only people still able to dream are North America’s Indigenous people, and it is their marrow that holds the cure for the rest of the world. In a futuristic world ravaged by global warming, people have lost the ability to dream, and the dreamlessness has led to widespread madness.
It is a Globe and Mail Best Book, a Canada Reads (CBC Books) 2018 selection and the 2018 winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award (Canada Council for the Arts). Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves is a standalone dystopian novel published in 2017.
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