The Marrow Thieves (Cherie Dimaline)

The Marrow Thieves
The Marrow Thieves series, Book 1
Cherie Dimaline
DCB
Fiction, YA? Horror/Sci-Fi
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Francis, or Frenchie to his family and friends, is too young to remember the world before: before cataclysmic climate disasters, before the ecosystem collapse and wasting of the world's great cities, before so much pure water was irreparably polluted... before the mysterious plague that rendered most people unable to dream and Native Americans as targets. As the lack of dreams drove most of the world to madness, natives seemed unaffected... and what the white people could not learn or appropriate, they once again stole, harvesting their marrow for a serum to treat dreamlessness. Young or old, northern or southern tribes, even mixed bloods or those unfortunate enough to look "other", all are subject to the recruiters, and few who are taken to the new "schools" are ever seen again. For a while, Frenchie had his family, but one by one they've all been taken, until it was just him, a sickly boy on the run... until he encountered the others.
For several years, the now-sixteen-year-old Frenchie has been with Miig and a handful of other "bush Indians", fleeing through the northern wilderness toward rumors of possible sanctuary. He has learned to hunt, to track, to live off the land, and some scraps of the old ways and old languages... but still he lives a harried existence, always aware of the Recruiters and their agents - Native American traitors, who lure their kin to their dooms like Judas goats - who could be anywhere. His companions may not be family by birth, but they are family - and, soon, Frenchie will learn just how far he's willing to go for the sake of family.

REVIEW: This story takes the historical exploitation (and attempted erasure) of Native Americans and projects it into a dystopian future, where they and their dreams are literally hunted down and harvested for sale to white people. Frenchie is both a survivor and a teenager; driven by extreme circumstances, he grows up faster than he should have to, yet is still a teen boy at heart when it comes to girls and, later, rivals for attention and affection. Everyone comes to Miig's makeshift family bearing scars, often in the literal sense, and over the course of the book most of their stories come out, all of them dark in their own ways and revealing more about the future world they live in, the desperation and insanity that has driven things to such horrific extremes. It's ultimately a story about how far one will go for love and survival; even the white people are, in their own brutal and blindered way, driven by the desire to survive, as the lack of dreams pushes them to murder and suicide which, on top of plummeting birth rates, threatens their future at least as much as what they've done to the world, a sort of generational mass suicide they refused to see until the noose was too tight around their necks (and even then refuse to acknowledge). As one might expect in such a story, there's a fair bit of pain and despair and loss, but also strength and hope for renewal and rebirth. The tale moves fairly well, though it feels incomplete by the end, like a song paused in the middle of a verse (and with a slight hint of plot convenience around a few incidents). Even being the first of what is apparently slated to be a trilogy, it felt unfinished. Still, The Marrow Thieves is a justly-lauded tale of cultural and ecological devastation, the wages of racism, and dreams lost and found.

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