YA stories from authors across Indigenous North America, each story has a beautiful message, from letting go of family drama, to experiencing first love, to healing the grief of losing a grandparent. To those losing grandparents, this might heal something in you, too ❤️

The summary on the back of my copy of the book sums up exactly what this is about: “Antelope Woman ingeniously illuminates how [that] history affects the contemporary descendants of these families who are the product of two different cultures - Ojibwe and White - which set in uneasy relationship to one another.”

The writing of this story is beautiful yet modern, carving space for not only the traditional but also the contemporary. Some of the scenes I felt were a little unnecessary, but overall it was an engaging family history with aspects of magical realism that don’t fit the typical mold for that genre.

This follows the two families, one of a grandmother killed by the bayonet of a soldier, and the other family, descendants of the haunted soldier. It’s a tricky family dynamic and the audiobook made it a little more confusing, but there is a family tree published in the book and on the publishers website so you can look to that to clear up any confusion.

This book is beautifully written, Yaa Gyasi has a poetic beauty in her writing. I love the narrator, Bahni Turpin, and she did a great job as well. This book has probably touched and impacted a lot of us with religious trauma, trying to come to terms with how we view and practice faith. I just found the cycle of the story was a bit repetitive for my taste. There is a lot to be said about grief, mental illness and addiction in this book, but I wish some things were touched on further, such as Gifty’s sexuality. Maybe it was something that didn’t need to be mentioned, but I’ve found that my sexuality and religious trauma are intimately connected, and I think it would be the same for Gifty.

I remember hearing the news that Plestia had made it out of Palestine after following her on IG for a couple months, and I was so happy she made it out alive, though I know to leave Gaza and her home behind broke her heart. The fact that she’s able to make jokes and lean on humor as a coping mechanism is truly amazing when you also read about the horrible things she saw on the ground as a journalist. She makes sarcastic and joking commentary on many things, including calling her old MySpace post “cringe” and joking about the amount of ppl in Gaza named Mohammad. Some notes I took while reading:

• She was so stressed out her body broke out in a rash, yet she still felt undeserving of medical treatment because there were others in worse condition and not enough doctors to treat them….

• She is only a couple years younger than me. We were probably reading the same tumblr quotes, yet her life has been massively different than mine. How can we both view “this too shall pass” in the same ways, when I’m reading it from an emotional standpoint and she’s viewing it from a survival standpoint….

• One of her ex coworkers literally cannot visit his family even though they are displaced within the same city, because he is a journalist and he doesn’t want to endanger his family with Israel purposefully targeting journalists… this is abominable.

• Her grandmother was 2 when the first Nakba happened, and now her granddaughter is experiencing it too. Reminds me of the lyric “Carrying your mother’s mother’s torment, I think I’m where the bloodline ends”

This is a classic for a reason. Alice Walker is the person who found Zora Neale Hurston’s unmarked grave, and I can see Zora’s influence in Walker’s writing. While the timeline is a bit confusing & sometimes doesn’t align, it’s a gripping story that will make you FEEL for the characters, even the ones you think can’t be humanized. Alice Walker, like Toni Morrison, is able to create these characters & stories that may be hard to stomach but that are essential to read and understand.