Book Review: The Marrow Thieves by Cheri Dimaline

The Marrow Thieves opened this years book club that I attend. It was a lovely day, we met in a lovely home, grass still green and cars travelling freely. Our host welcomed us into her home with a warm welcome. Then we discussed this dystopian story that paints a bleak picture of emptied and forgotten neighbourhoods, how travel was furtive and for survival, welcome was hesitant and cautious. A world where trust had been as badly damaged as our land and our communities. Cheri Dimaline told Frenchie’s story ~ the story of an eleven year old Indigenous youth in a city that had been Toronto, and the acute White/Indigenous divide that made survival almost impossible. His story begins with the sacrifice that his cousin made ~ Mitch’s life for Frenchie’s opportunity to escape the Recruiters. Mitch had been Frenchie’s only surviving relative. His journey begins there, as he clung desperately to a pine tree for hours to avoid Mitch’s fate. His journey continues alone, hungry and tired, but his father had given him directions to keep going north. He does find community ~ a community led by Miigwaans who has gathered a rag-tag group of disparate individuals from different tribes all escaping from the Recruiters. They are of different ages from Ri-Ri age seven who finds some beautiful pink boots, to Minerva, the elder of the community, carried and protected, who sacrifices her life to protect the tiny community. They have to draw on their skills of tracking and knowing the land, a challenge for the young urban raised people in the community. Their community has no name, but has the dreams and beliefs of the elders that they will continue to survive. Dreams are often mentioned throughout the book. This word engendered much discussion trying to sort out what it meant. To me, it meant an intuitive belief in the connection we have with each other. The white population had lost that ability to dream and were seeking out any ‘qualifying’ Indigenous individuals to extract their marrow and find the DNA that would give them back their ability to dream. Thus the Recruiters and thus those Indigenous individuals whose greed for a pay off was greater than a desire for community.

I was skeptical when I learned that this was work of Children/Young Adult fiction. Our book club members are all north of sixty five years old. I did however, trust the judgement of the woman who suggested this book. I’m glad that we read this book. Yes, it was dystopian and tragic, but the human elements of looking for home when your home has been taken from you, growing family relationships when your own family has been destroyed, and experiencing feelings ~ pleasant and unpleasant ~ engendered by extremely unpredictable circumstances made this story very real.

“We go to the schools and they leach the dreams from 

where our ancestors hid them, in the honeycombs of 

slushy marrow buried in our bones. And us? Well, we 

join our ancestors, hoping we left enough dreams 

behind for the next generation to stumble across.”

~ Cheri Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves

Title: The Marrow Thieves

Author: Cherie Dimaline

Copyright: 2017

Format:  Issued in Print and Electronic Formats

ISBN-978-1-77086-486-3 (Paperback)

ISBN-978-1-77086-487-0 (html)

Type: Children/Young Adult Fiction

Publisher:  Cormorant Books, Inc.

Printed and bound in Canada

United States Library of Congress Control Number:  2016945346