A New Year of Reading

Narrated by Shaun Taylor-Corbett and Kinsale Hueston, A Snake Falls to Earth tells the story of Nina and Oli. Nina is a Lipan Apache girl who lives in our world but has always felt there was something more out there. She has always and still believes in the old stories. Oli is a cottonmouth kid from the land of spirits and monsters. Cast from his home, Oli finds a new one on the banks of the bottomless lake. They have no idea that the other exists until a catastrophic event here on Earth and a strange sickness befalling Oli’s best friend drives the two worlds together. For the first time in centuries the worlds come together and there are some who are willing to kill to keep them apart. 

Beautifully written and read, this is a wonderful work of Indigenous futurism drawing on traditional Lipan Apache storytelling to weave a tale of monsters, magic, and the importance of family. 

Both stories are read Isabella Star LeBlanc and take place in the same world and Sugar Island community near Sault Ste Marie, Michigan. In Firekeeper’s Daughter, eighteen-year-old Daunis Fontaine navigates never quite fitting in with the wealthy white side of her family or the Firekeeper side on the nearby Ojibwe reservation. She wants a fresh start and has hopes of going to college when a family tragedy strikes and she puts her dreams on hold to be there for her mother. When Daunis gets caught up in an FBI drug investigation, she agrees to go undercover to track down the source of the drugs using both her knowledge of chemistry and Ojibwe traditional medicine. Things become more complicated than she ever thought possible and despite mounting deceptions and death, she struggles to protect her community even when doing so threatens the only world she’s ever known. 

Warrior Girl Unearthed follows Daunis’s niece, Perry Firekeeper-Birch, a laid-back twin and best fisher on Sugar Island. Working in a summer internship, Perry becomes aware of and concerned by the rising number of missing Indigenous women in her community and across the US through her work with her local cultural center. Upon discovering centuries long misappropriation of Anishinaabe sacred and funerary objects, Perry has no choice but to rescue and reclaim them. Counting on her overachieving twin sister, underachieving friends, and community allies, she vows to find and solve the mysteries of the missing women and history of her community. 

Listening to these stories is so powerful because readers get to hear the Ojibwe mowin (Ojibwe language) said and pronounced as it is meant to be. LeBlanc’s cadence and attention to delivering the story in a way that honors and authentically represents Anishinaabe storytelling, history, and cultural knowledges/practices is fantastic. Readers do these stories more justice by listening to them than reading them. 

There are a total of 18 books in the Chief Inspector Gamache series. The first books in the series are read by Ralph Coshum and the last are read by Robert Bathurst (of Downton Abbey). Inspector Gamache is a chief inspector in the provincial police in Quebec. It is a murder-mystery series reminiscent of Agatha Christie. Many, though not all, of the murders throughout the series happen in or connected to people who live in a rural village named Three Pines. It’s so rural and remote that it’s not located on any maps and the only way most people find it is through being lost. The rural environment and culture of the village are often factors in solving murders.

In Coshum’s and Bathurst’s skillful reading, the characters come alive, which makes the character-driven action of the story that much more compelling. It was also great to be able to hear pronunciations of French words that I would’ve never gotten in the too-long time I’d stare at them while reading. I found myself frustrated when I had to wait on copies to become available, they were that good.