Reviews with content warning for Racism - Firekeeper's Daughter

I couldn't put this book, it definitely threw off my sleep schedule. I found myself really immersing in the story, the characters, and Daunis' journey. I have also been looking for more stories with diverse perspectives and this is the first book I've read with a native main character. I'm thankful the author shared some of her culture through this book. Everything from the characters, place and stakes feel real, from the joy and connection of community to the harsh reality of the injustice that native women face.

Even though I am giving this book such a high rating, it has a lot of problems and loose ends. I did feel like the beginning was slow on the mystery/investigation side. It took a while for Daunis to move the discovery and sleuthing along, but it does pick up and keep you guessing. The twists are not so surprising because they are hinted at many times. It may be worth pushing through if you feel like it's not picking up at first, but I think it can come off mishandling serious topics and juggling too many plotlines, characters and information. It is quite long and some of it could have been cut down. There are a couple of things that gnawed at me and you can see the short, vague spoiler or the longer spoilers to see if this will be a hit or miss for you.

Short:

The romance between Daunis and Jamie is weird. Not only is he a 22 year old with a secretive career while Daunis is an 18 year old that just started college, but there is an unhealthy power dynamic between them. It's also instalove.

There is a rape scene that receives no justice and feels unnecessary to add, especially since more could have done in handling in the aftermath of it better.

Daunis' development is sprinkled in along with the billion other plotlines and ideas that get mentioned almost every page. She is very judgmental toward women her age as a nonfeminine, sporty woman in STEM who thinks she's so different than other girls. They are times where she realizes she has been unfairly judging others, but there was too much going in the plot.

There is just a lot going on in general.

Long:

I wasn't a fan of Daunis and "Jamie." First, this is a man with a whole agent career interested in a girl who hasn't started college yet, barely 18 while he's 22. Plus it was his idea to make her a CI and to fake date her all while she's grieving her best friend, her uncle and thinks her grandma's dying. He took advantage and I couldn't get over how icky their relationship felt so I never rooted for them. I was glad they didn't officially end up together and she chose herself and told him to choose himself. They didn't love each other, in my opinion.

Also there is a point where Daunis is sexually assaulted and I couldn't understand why that was included. I believe the intention was to bring attention to how native women are assaulted, killed, and kidnapped at alarming rates and there often isn't justice. I don't think it would make sense for Daunis to be truly healed from this and it is acknowledged at the end with the yellow pansies. Though there is a lot going in the story and I think that there was probably too much going on to give this plotline and other certain aspects more time in the narrative to do it justice. As I mentioned, there are a lot of areas that have no resolution. I decided that was intentional to show that realistically justice does not happen as we'd want it to. However, the mention of rape and the rape scene needed more time dedicated to acknowledgment and careful handing of it. It is also heavily implied that Dana raped Levi Sr. and it's just brushed past. I did side-eye how this was handled during Daunis and Levi Jr.'s conversation toward the end.

I saw Daunis' judgmental attitude toward other young women as a flaw and I wish it was more obvious that she was growing and realizing that she was being terrible to those girls just like the guys she criticizes. She always calls out Levi for not treating women with respect, but she doesn't either even if she's not sleeping with those girls like Levi or the boys on the hockey team. At first, she criticizes the girlfriends of the hockey players as "anglerfish girlfriends" (bottom feeder fish that latch onto their partner like a parasite - a paraphrase of her words). But when she "becomes" one herself, she realizes by spending time with the girls that she was wrong about them and they are very nice, despite how mean and distant she has been to them.

Admittedly, you have to suspend a lot of belief to think that this 18 year old could do all this, but hey, that's for you to decide if you want to turn a blind eye. For me, there were flaws, but I think me connecting with Daunis, her feeling like a real person, relatable and flawed, is what made me intuitively think this was 5 stars instead of somewhere between 4 and 5 stars...

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