Bad Cree

A Novel

English language

Published Dec. 20, 2023 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

ISBN:
978-0-385-54869-4
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3 stars (6 reviews)

When Mackenzie wakes up with a severed crow's head in her hands, she panics. Only moments earlier she had been fending off masses of birds in a snow-covered forest. In bed, when she blinks, the head disappears.

Night after night, Mackenzie's dreams return her to a memory from before her sister Sabrina's untimely death: a weekend at the family's lakefront campsite, long obscured by a fog of guilt. But when the waking world starts closing in, too--a murder of crows stalks her every move around the city, she wakes up from a dream of drowning throwing up water, and gets threatening text messages from someone claiming to be Sabrina--Mackenzie knows this is more than she can handle alone.

Traveling north to her rural hometown in Alberta, she finds her family still steeped in the same grief that she ran away to Vancouver to escape. They welcome her back, but their …

4 editions

So scary (I am a big wuss), but too good to put down!

5 stars

Carve out some time for this one because you'll want to finish it in one sitting! Whether you're familiar with the aspects of nehiyaw culture that drive the plot or not, this masterpiece of tension, emotion, and language will have your eyeballs glued to the words from start to finish.

A story about always already being home with family & community, the centrality of femme's and women's relationships in Indigenous life, and how to live through grief together. And a crucial commentary on the violence that lives on and continues to harm the land and its existants in the aftermath of extraction.