293 reviews for:

Three Day Road

Joseph Boyden

4.2 AVERAGE


This is more of a 3.5 than a 3. I read this for a book club I just joined and found out before I started it that Joseph Boyden, although described in his author's bio at the front of the book as Métis, is a white dude who's lied to Indigenous communities and has insisted for years that he's Indigenous, but when people started to look into this and found out that he was lying, he said he identifies as "a white kid with native roots" which is a big yikes from me. This took me a while to get through because it's so dense and jumps back and forth a lot in a confusing way. It reminded me a lot of a play I saw earlier this year called Redpatch, also about an Indigenous soldier in WWI who's trying to cope with what he's done and seen.

https://recenseernogeenkeer.wordpress.com/2016/03/15/three-day-road/

There really aren't words to describe how I felt coming to the end of this. What comes to mind is sad, relieved, pleased, exhausted, rejuvenated... but none of those seem quite right. Joseph Boyden constructed a fantastic piece of storytelling. Three Day Road is well-crafted and beautiful at its ugly core. More people need to read it.