The Marrow Thieves - Cherie Dimaline

⭐ 8.0/10

(Originally written by hoodie_logi)

I managed to read this entire book on a road trip with my family today and it was honestly great. The concept is suuuuper interesting. In a world ravaged by global warming, society has almost completely collapsed. As the world fell apart, people slowly lost the ability to dream, causing lots of insanity and delirium on top of disease and lack of resources. That is, everyone except for the indigenous peoples of North America (And maybe indigenous people of the pacific islands, but it's a little unclear). In an effort to dream again, what is left of the Canadian government found out that the secret to dreaming lies in the bone marrow of the indigenous people. The white people act predictably, and restart the residential school system in order to commit genocide once again and harvest the bone marrow of the indigenous people, killing them off once again.

The book follows the experience of one teenage boy, Frenchie, and his adopted family. The book heavily explores the themes of Canada's past sins, genocide, residential schools, breaking of treaties, while adding in the fun twist of a global climate catastrophe. Most of all, the book deals with the theme of persevering in the face of certain doom and maintaining hope when there appears to be none.

I really enjoyed this book and can't think of many fiction books that are more relevant to our Canadian experience today. My only complaint is that the romance of the main character and his love interest was not well written. Super hot and cold with no reason, little consequences for his actions and I never felt the author built up a great connection between the two to begin with. BUT, this is not the driving theme of the book and I think it hits on other themes extremely well.