Take a photo of a barcode or cover
happiestfunrock 's review for:
Split Tooth
by Tanya Tagaq
Some books you carry like a burden, others like a wound. Tanya Tagaq’s Split Tooth is both, and it is all the fiercer for it. It was my partner’s mother - poet and seer in equal measure - who pressed it into my hands, hopefully knowing full well the mark it would leave.
This is not a book for the faint-hearted. It speaks in tongues older than memory, in rhythms that echo bone against bone and blood on snow. Its narrator, a girl on the threshold of adulthood in the frozen vastness of Nunavut, moves between the real and the unreal with an ease that feels less like choice and more like necessity. In this world, spirits and animals share the breath of the living. Nature is no mere backdrop but a force eternal, indifferent, and as savage as it is sacred.
Tagaq’s language is jagged and beautiful, stripped of pretense, and full of a strange kind of grace. There are no chapters, no neat divisions - just moments, fragments, lives bleeding into one another. The land is rendered with a precision that cuts: the sharp edge of a frostbitten wind, the endless dark, the oppressive silence that is never truly silent.
And yet, the story it tells is not silence but survival. Tagaq holds nothing back: the traumas of colonialism, the wounds carried by her people, the violence of life itself. Her prose spares no one, least of all the reader. But in the unflinching darkness, there is light too. The kind of light that lingers, stubborn and unyielding, even in the coldest night.
She must have known what she was doing when she suggested me to read this book. Split Tooth does not ask for permission or forgiveness; it enters your mind like a winter storm, and you’ll find yourself changed when it passes. What is myth? What is memory? Tagaq offers no answers. Only the truth, naked and unvarnished.
This is a book for those willing to confront the feral and the sacred within themselves. For those who understand that beauty is often cruel and survival is its own kind of grace. Read it, but know that it will read you in return. Thank you, for the gift and the weight of it.
This is not a book for the faint-hearted. It speaks in tongues older than memory, in rhythms that echo bone against bone and blood on snow. Its narrator, a girl on the threshold of adulthood in the frozen vastness of Nunavut, moves between the real and the unreal with an ease that feels less like choice and more like necessity. In this world, spirits and animals share the breath of the living. Nature is no mere backdrop but a force eternal, indifferent, and as savage as it is sacred.
Tagaq’s language is jagged and beautiful, stripped of pretense, and full of a strange kind of grace. There are no chapters, no neat divisions - just moments, fragments, lives bleeding into one another. The land is rendered with a precision that cuts: the sharp edge of a frostbitten wind, the endless dark, the oppressive silence that is never truly silent.
And yet, the story it tells is not silence but survival. Tagaq holds nothing back: the traumas of colonialism, the wounds carried by her people, the violence of life itself. Her prose spares no one, least of all the reader. But in the unflinching darkness, there is light too. The kind of light that lingers, stubborn and unyielding, even in the coldest night.
She must have known what she was doing when she suggested me to read this book. Split Tooth does not ask for permission or forgiveness; it enters your mind like a winter storm, and you’ll find yourself changed when it passes. What is myth? What is memory? Tagaq offers no answers. Only the truth, naked and unvarnished.
This is a book for those willing to confront the feral and the sacred within themselves. For those who understand that beauty is often cruel and survival is its own kind of grace. Read it, but know that it will read you in return. Thank you, for the gift and the weight of it.