This was a wonderful own voices title from Indigenous Australian authors. I honestly couldn't think of a single author I knew that fell under both of those categories before. I really REALLY hope we'll get more Indigenous authors published by mainstream publishers in the coming years. Indigenous rep seems to have completely fallen to the wayaide despite the "We Need Diverse Books" campaign and readers asking for diversity.

Despite being less than 200 pages, it covered a lot of things about how Indigenous people were treated under colonization. Now I apologise but I'm going to use the Canadian terms for them. I am just not well versed in Indigenous Australian history beyond the fact that I KNOW we did similar things in Canada.
-Missing & murdered Indigenous women
-Modern day death rates of Indigenous people's
-The 60s Scoop
-Residential Schools

This book deals a lot with death. I can honestly say that as a cis straight white person--even from a lower class upbringing--I know one person who has died and it was health problems. I'm quite lucky. The consistency of deaths in Indigenous communities is still to this day STAGGERING in Canada. There were serious parallels between the murder mystery of this book "how are this many people dying in such a small town" and "this was ignored or swept under the rug." Yet, despite this book involving and revolving around a lot of death, it wasn't particularly depressing nor did it ignore the impact of deaths. It was sort of cathartic for me as a reader. The main character's father grieves through the whole book. Though it is such a short book, this wasn't hastened. It was done with care and gradually built up.

I loved how the authors wove in all of the issues Indigenous people are and have faced along with their cultural beliefs of the cycle of lives and souls and how we are interwoven with animals and nature.