Birdie - Tracey Lindberg (53)

• ASIN: ‎ 1443451355
• Publisher: ‎ HarperCollins Publishers; Reprint edition (February 16, 2016)
• Paperback: ‎ 288 pages

AMAZON

Bernice Meetoos will not be broken.

A big, beautiful Cree woman with a dark secret in her past, Bernice (”Birdie”) has left her home in northern Alberta to travel to Gibsons, B.C. She is on something of a vision quest, looking for family, for home, for understanding. She is also driven by the leftover teenaged desire to meet Pat Johns--Jesse from The Beachcombers--because he is, as she says, a working, healthy Indian man. Birdie heads for Molly’s Reach to find answers, but they are not the ones she expected.

With the arrival in Gibsons of her Auntie Val and her cousin Skinny Freda, Birdie begins to draw from her dreams the lessons she was never fully taught in life. Informed by the lore and knowledge of Cree traditions, Birdie is a darkly comic and moving first novel about the universal experience of recovering from tragedy. At heart, it is the story of an extraordinary woman who travels to the deepest part of herself to find the strength to face the past and to build a new life.

TRACEY LINDBERG is a citizen of As’in’i’wa’chi Ni’yaw Nation Rocky Mountain Cree and hails from the Kelly Lake Cree Nation community. She is an award-winning writer for her academic work and teaches Indigenous studies and Indigenous laws at two universities in Canada. She sings the blues loudly, talks quietly and is next in a long line of argumentative Cree women. Birdie, her first novel, was one of Apple’s Best Books for June, and earned Tracey a spot on CBC’s list of “Writers to Watch.”

REVIEW:

My daughter bought me this book for my birthday/Christmas gift. I was stoked to read an Indigenous book by a Canadian Indigenous author, being an Indigenous Canadian myself.

I connected to this amazing story in so many ways. I saw myself in Birdie. I'm sure a lot of us do. I also saw myself in Freda though, and not just in name. The story of these five women was powerful. It was told in the most interesting way, I feel like it is still resonating through me as I write this review.

Pretty incredible debut novel!

Miigwetch to my daughter for gifting it to me!

5/5

**Compensation may be earned from the link within. This copy was a gift. Opinions are owned by Freda's Voice.