Reviews with content warning for Dementia - The Removed

This book was a beautiful and haunting story of a families grief and how each person dealt with it. Very little action occurs but you truly get a feel for the families grief and how their ancestral influences helped them to cope and overcome it.

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challenging dark emotional medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

I’m honestly not sure how to rate this book. I loved the premise of the story, but it just didn’t seem to carry over from concept to actuality. However, there were some parts of the book that were great. The way that the story addressed the effects of intergenerational trauma and incorporated it as a running theme throughout the book was done really well.

I’m not familiar with Indigenous history (beyond the basics) or culture, and have only recently started reading some literature written by Indigenous authors. I loved seeing Cherokee history and mythology incorporated into the story, although it didn’t always feel as though these were integrated seamlessly into the rest of the story.

While the story begins with a relevant and incredibly timely event, the unwarranted shooting of a young Cherokee boy by a racist cop, this seemed more for shock value, and played such a small role in the plot. Ray-Ray’s cause of death played such a small role in the story, and when it ultimately did pop up later in the book, it led to two ultimately unfulfilling confrontations.

The entire story just felt underdeveloped and unresolved. There was a sense that so much more could have come out of this book, but it just never made the leap. The characters had potential, but wound up being bland. Sonja could have been quite an intriguing character, but fell into an obsessive romantic fantasy with underpinnings of … other, which wound up having a completely unrewarding outcome for both Sonja and me, as the reader. Edgar’s chapters just ramble incessantly at the beginning, with a strange fixation on the word “fowl,” for some reason. His trip into the Darkening Land wasn’t ever really fully explained, and it took a strange detour into magical realism with dark undertones that made less and less sense as the book went on. Maria’s chapters made the most sense to me, but even those felt like there should have been more.

I felt the most connection to Maria, but overall, the book left me wondering about what actually happened. I devoured the book hoping for a sense of closure, but in the end, it wound up feeling … unfinished to me. I wasn’t expecting the book to have such overtones of magical realism, which isn’t a genre that I generally enjoy. So this could have contributed to my confusion about this book, but I’m still feeling confused and torn about this one. I think the idea was great, but it just didn’t really come through for me personally.

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medium-paced

Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

This book focuses on the Echota family, and the way each family member experiences grief and is living their lives 15 years after Ray-Ray, their 15 year old son/brother was shot and killed by a police officer.

I had really high expectations for this book going in. It sounded extremely timely and like it would really be something I could connect with. Every adult has experienced grief at some point in their lives, and I was interested to see the way each family member handled the loss of Ray-Ray. However, I did not necessarily feel a connection to any of them. Maria, the mother and matriarch of the family, was the one for whom I had the most empathy. I felt sad for her and all that she endured. With one child gone, another addicted to drugs, and a husband suffering from Alzheimer's, she was surely dealing with a lot. I also liked Wyatt, but wish I had been given more of his story.

However, I found a lot of the book to be far-fetched and so strange that I expected certain storylines to be revealed as a dream or fantasy world. There were things that made no sense in a realistic world, and they were never explained in a way that was satisfactory to me.

And as much as I didn't connect with the story, I do actually think it should've been longer. I think that would've allowed the storylines to be more fleshed out and given the reader a better understanding and more complete picture of each character. It felt like so much was crammed into each person's story, but none of it really went any deeper than the surface.

While I liked the idea of interspersing Native American folklore into the story, I didn't feel like it was executed well. I actually found those chapters to be disconnected from the rest of the story. They almost seemed like "filler" and I didn't feel as if they tied into the overall plot of the book very well. I don't know if it just went over my head or if others will feel the same way.

Overall, I felt that the author tried to add in too many plot points without enough depth. It tried to cover a lot of important topics, but didn't give any of them enough exploration to be worthwhile. I also think that having Ray-Ray having been killed by a police officer served no real purpose in the story. He literally could have died any other way and the rest of the story could've been kept largely the same.

There was one plot point in Sonja (the daughter's) story, and one small encounter at the end of the book that tied into that part of the plot, but otherwise, it didn't really serve any purpose.

That all being said, I am sure that some people will love this book. It was a fairly quick read, and I did like that the chapters were short and we got to see things from each family member's viewpoint. I am admittedly not a very abstract reader, and too much of it was unrealistic for me to enjoy the book.

I received a free copy of this book from netgalley and the publisher in exchange for my honest review.

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