The Marrow Thieves. Cherie Dimaline
Who’s your favourite writer? I’ve always dreaded being asked that question because I didn’t have one, until now. Cherie Dimaline is my new favourite writer. I read and reviewed Empire of Wild (2019) not long ago because the cover was so striking. Last week, I finally picked up The Marrow Thieves.
This short, dark, dense, YA book won numerous prestigious awards when DCB released it in 2017. TIME magazine declared it one of the Best YA Books of All Time. Why?
The Marrow Thieves is timely. Emotional. Superbly written. Thought-provoking. Gut-wrenching. Grave.
This dystopian novel is labeled Science Fiction. It’s also labeled Young Adult, I assume because it has limited sex and course language, and the main character, Frenchie, is a sixteen-year-old Metis man-boy on the run with an eccentric familial crew in the forests of northern Canada. With him are Frenchie’s love interest Rose (16); Chi-Boy (17) and Wab (18) who are one sweet couple; Tree and Zheegwan, 12-year-old twin boys; Slopper, nine and delightful; Ri-Ri , a seven-year-old girl whose grown up with them from infancy; Minerva their Anishinaabe Elder; and Miigwan who holds them all together.
The story is set in the not-too-distant future, before 2050, in a time I may not be physically here to see, but perhaps you will. Global warming, a concept we are becoming more and more familiar with each day, has destroyed most of the world. Tectonic plates shifted. Cities crumbled into the sea. America fought Canada for clean water from northern rivers. The Great Lakes were “polluted to muck … fenced off, too poisonous for use” (24). The government militarized. The North melted. People died in masses from disaster and disease and stopped reproducing. And then the non-Indigenous folks stopped dreaming. Which brings us to the crux of the story.
The only people who can still dream are Indigenous. As Miig explains: “Dreams get caught in the webs woven in your bones … You are born with them. Your DNA weaves them into marrow like spinners … That’s where they pluck them from” (19). Frenchie’s band of survivors are running north because they’re being hunted for their bone marrow. The government has built new “residential schools” and hired “recruiters” to track down and capture anyone with Indigenous ancestry. They work them, kill them, and siphon their melted marrow into vials labeled by age and nation. The historical echo of exploitation and genocide rips through this book leaving us horrified.
But, take a deep breath. This is science fiction. Right?
Cherie Dimaline is a multi-award-winning author from the Georgia Bay Metis Community in Ontario. Her writing is so fresh, so original, so stylish and real, I’m hoping it seeps into my own bone marrow. I hope she is not a prophet, but merely issuing a warning like those forest fires and floods and Hellish droughts that continue to shake and shock us.
Listen up. Young Adult or grandmother, if you read no other books, please read this one. Preferably aloud to each other. And then talk it out. And hug it out.
And if this book seems too dark and depressing and your guts are already shivering, know this. The sequel is coming out this October. Hunting by Stars. I’ve already pre-ordered my paperback. You see, I have hope for Frenchie and his crew. And I have a new favourite writer.
Photo from her website, cheriedimaline.com which has a wealth of information about who she is.