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lemelyjerry's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
vickie101101's review against another edition
5.0
I first found out about this book a few years ago. Someone I have never made time to read it. I have recently finished Monique's resiliency course that uses this book throughout the coursework. I finally decided it was time to sit down with Tilly and read the book from start to finish. It is an easy read. I got the book done in one day. With that being said I really loved it. I found myself crying, laughing and cringing from second hand embarrassment throughout this book. As someone who works with Indigenous youth, I will be bringing in my copy of Tilly to read with the kids. I found it too powerful not to share.
chloe124's review against another edition
challenging
dark
lighthearted
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0
sassispring's review against another edition
5.0
This is an excellent story. My niece who is 9 years old, read this book with her mother and really enjoyed the story. The story is based on the writer's life, and grandmother (Tilly), and shows optimism and healing through racism and family pain. I recommend reading this amazing story.
chrisp189's review
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
wingsofareader's review against another edition
4.0
Monique G. Smith's thinly veiled memoir was a lovely read. Speaking as an educator who is always on the lookout for First Nations / Aboriginal materials of high quality writing and of high interest for a variety of vocabulary levels (secondary grades) for my students here in Canada's North, Tilly was particularly exciting.
Gray's strength is, perhaps, in her ability to gracefully draw characters to whom readers can connect, but to do so in a manner that is almost unobtrusive. I was reminded of stylized art, where deceptively simple looking lines manage to imply the essence of a flower or a human shape, without busy detail, but do so in such a way that you never doubt what it is you are looking at. Gray trusts the reader to grasp what it is that Tilly is experiencing as a child, the many reasons that her Grandmother, the Tilly the Elder is named, is so vital to the sense of identity that enables her to survive later challenges, and the many ways and reasons you can love people but may need to let them come into and go out of your life as years pass.
Characters, events and settings alike are treated with this delicacy, each offered to the reader like gifts - honestly and openly but never with a sense that the author is scrambling to over explain or to force her experience on anyone. Rather the gift is an invitation, as if Gray is saying: here is my story, here is how I remember it, how I felt, what I knew then, and what others taught me and gave to me, and I offer it to you in case you find something you need in what I have to share.
That is not to say that there are not raw memories, or difficult passages. Tilly's family are viscerally impacted by both the cultural genocide that was the travesty of the Residential School assimilation plan in Canada, a joint effort of the Federal Governments, the Roman Catholic Church's and Anglican Church's governing bodies of several decades, and of the subsequent Sixties Scoop, during which time the systemic racism of the Residential School era was continued under inequitably administered health and social service policies such that First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children were not only seized from their homes, often with little or no warning, nevermind permission, but were then placed entirely outside their home communities and in non-Aboriginal communities, where they were subjected to more of the teaching which ingrained in them a belief that their only hope at being valued in this world was to deny anything and everything about themselves that might mark them as being Aboriginal.
One of the tragedies in this history of system and internalized racism, which is still very much a part of our country's mental framework when it comes to how we treat with our Aboriginal neighbours, is that there are few easy lines where Evil is on one side and Good on the other. There were people who honestly felt that what they did was in the best interest of the Aboriginal peoples, who thought that their ham-handed approach was helpful, and whose intentions, if narrow minded, were also ultimately, driven by a foundational assumption that they were trying to make things "better" for people who were "other" in some way. That they were causing - and in many ways continue to cause - profound and significant harm, sometimes even while they offer some limited benefits, was often not discussed, or even recognized. In fact, in many cases, the truth of the situations were unknown, except to those compromised by the realities of hundreds of years of theft, subjugation, dehumanization, marginalization, enforced poverty and systemic and officially condoned - even codified - racism.
Tilly is a novel which not only demonstrates some of that reality, uncovering it for the reader as the main character, maturing from confused child, to hurt adult, to strong woman, discovers how it has impacted her own life, and the lives of her neighbours, friends and family, but offers this truth as well: despite formal and informal attempts to rid North America of it's First Peoples, despite physical wars aimed at attrition, social and cultural policies aimed at cultural genocide, at getting rid of, to quote Duncan Campbell Scott, "the Indian Problem" ( Conversations With A Dead Man , Mark Abley>), the First Nations peoples are still here. They are resilient beyond anything that the first European settlers could have imagined. They have resisted the attempts of interlopers to destroy their connection to the land, to make it impossible for them to keep any of their traditions alive, or to pass on knowledge and values through that most vital of all cultural tools, language. Unlike what many European powers have done in similar situations, they have never instigated a large scale war against those who invaded, they never brought to bear weapons of mass destruction. Their resilience, almost entirely, almost uniformly around the world, has been rooted in community, in culture, not in meeting violence with increased violence.
Ultimately, that is the gift Gray shares in Tilly - how the people in our lives, our various cultural connections - in Tilly's case a mixed ancestry of Scottish, Lakota and Cree - provides a wealth of knowledge, of connections, and of strength that sustains her, that is the basis of her resilience, resilience which is ultimately, her hope and her story.
As there is no graphic / explicit sex or violence, although there is mention of sexual attraction and activity, drinking and drug use, it is my observation as an educator that with appropriate classroom support this resource could be used in the upper middle school to high school classroom. The vocabulary is not complex but the writing is descriptive, with the use of literary devices, particularly vivid imagery, simile and metaphor, with some personification. The entire story is told in the first person limited pov narrative style. It is my opinion, based on having heard Monique G. Smith speak and having read the book, that it is listed as a novel in order to allow for certain liberties with meshing certain characters or omitting others, without the hullabaloo that ensued after the Frey incident.
Gray's strength is, perhaps, in her ability to gracefully draw characters to whom readers can connect, but to do so in a manner that is almost unobtrusive. I was reminded of stylized art, where deceptively simple looking lines manage to imply the essence of a flower or a human shape, without busy detail, but do so in such a way that you never doubt what it is you are looking at. Gray trusts the reader to grasp what it is that Tilly is experiencing as a child, the many reasons that her Grandmother, the Tilly the Elder is named, is so vital to the sense of identity that enables her to survive later challenges, and the many ways and reasons you can love people but may need to let them come into and go out of your life as years pass.
Characters, events and settings alike are treated with this delicacy, each offered to the reader like gifts - honestly and openly but never with a sense that the author is scrambling to over explain or to force her experience on anyone. Rather the gift is an invitation, as if Gray is saying: here is my story, here is how I remember it, how I felt, what I knew then, and what others taught me and gave to me, and I offer it to you in case you find something you need in what I have to share.
That is not to say that there are not raw memories, or difficult passages. Tilly's family are viscerally impacted by both the cultural genocide that was the travesty of the Residential School assimilation plan in Canada, a joint effort of the Federal Governments, the Roman Catholic Church's and Anglican Church's governing bodies of several decades, and of the subsequent Sixties Scoop, during which time the systemic racism of the Residential School era was continued under inequitably administered health and social service policies such that First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children were not only seized from their homes, often with little or no warning, nevermind permission, but were then placed entirely outside their home communities and in non-Aboriginal communities, where they were subjected to more of the teaching which ingrained in them a belief that their only hope at being valued in this world was to deny anything and everything about themselves that might mark them as being Aboriginal.
One of the tragedies in this history of system and internalized racism, which is still very much a part of our country's mental framework when it comes to how we treat with our Aboriginal neighbours, is that there are few easy lines where Evil is on one side and Good on the other. There were people who honestly felt that what they did was in the best interest of the Aboriginal peoples, who thought that their ham-handed approach was helpful, and whose intentions, if narrow minded, were also ultimately, driven by a foundational assumption that they were trying to make things "better" for people who were "other" in some way. That they were causing - and in many ways continue to cause - profound and significant harm, sometimes even while they offer some limited benefits, was often not discussed, or even recognized. In fact, in many cases, the truth of the situations were unknown, except to those compromised by the realities of hundreds of years of theft, subjugation, dehumanization, marginalization, enforced poverty and systemic and officially condoned - even codified - racism.
Tilly is a novel which not only demonstrates some of that reality, uncovering it for the reader as the main character, maturing from confused child, to hurt adult, to strong woman, discovers how it has impacted her own life, and the lives of her neighbours, friends and family, but offers this truth as well: despite formal and informal attempts to rid North America of it's First Peoples, despite physical wars aimed at attrition, social and cultural policies aimed at cultural genocide, at getting rid of, to quote Duncan Campbell Scott, "the Indian Problem" ( Conversations With A Dead Man , Mark Abley>), the First Nations peoples are still here. They are resilient beyond anything that the first European settlers could have imagined. They have resisted the attempts of interlopers to destroy their connection to the land, to make it impossible for them to keep any of their traditions alive, or to pass on knowledge and values through that most vital of all cultural tools, language. Unlike what many European powers have done in similar situations, they have never instigated a large scale war against those who invaded, they never brought to bear weapons of mass destruction. Their resilience, almost entirely, almost uniformly around the world, has been rooted in community, in culture, not in meeting violence with increased violence.
Ultimately, that is the gift Gray shares in Tilly - how the people in our lives, our various cultural connections - in Tilly's case a mixed ancestry of Scottish, Lakota and Cree - provides a wealth of knowledge, of connections, and of strength that sustains her, that is the basis of her resilience, resilience which is ultimately, her hope and her story.
As there is no graphic / explicit sex or violence, although there is mention of sexual attraction and activity, drinking and drug use, it is my observation as an educator that with appropriate classroom support this resource could be used in the upper middle school to high school classroom. The vocabulary is not complex but the writing is descriptive, with the use of literary devices, particularly vivid imagery, simile and metaphor, with some personification. The entire story is told in the first person limited pov narrative style. It is my opinion, based on having heard Monique G. Smith speak and having read the book, that it is listed as a novel in order to allow for certain liberties with meshing certain characters or omitting others, without the hullabaloo that ensued after the Frey incident.
caseythecanadianlesbrarian's review against another edition
3.0
This is really something other than fiction, but it's compelling nonetheless and very honest and heartfelt. More thoughts later!
cweichel's review
4.0
This book is based on the author’s life. Tilly started drinking while in grade seven. She didn’t stop until she was in her twenties. This is her story of becoming sober, healing, and finding out how to help others.
Through it, readers discover the experiences of many indigenous people across Canada: residential schools, 60’s scoop, dysfunctional families, poverty, addiction, abuse and survival. It’s heartbreaking and heartwarming at the same time. There’s a reason the full title of this book is A Story of Hope and Resilience.
Through it, readers discover the experiences of many indigenous people across Canada: residential schools, 60’s scoop, dysfunctional families, poverty, addiction, abuse and survival. It’s heartbreaking and heartwarming at the same time. There’s a reason the full title of this book is A Story of Hope and Resilience.
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