This is a book that deals with big themes through the lens of a perspective most often erased: a young Native American woman; and the book handles that weight well.

CW for off-screen sexual assault

“Firekeeper’s Daughter follows 18-year-old Daunis Fontaine, a half-native, half-white former hockey player/aspiring scientist who never feels fully settled in either her reservation or the outside world. She finds herself even more torn when she witnesses her best friend’s murder and is pulled into an FBI investigation centered on a lethal new drug running wild among her friends and family. It doesn’t help that she’s falling for the mysterious Jamie, a new player on her brother’s hockey team who (spoiler alert) turns out to be an undercover FBI agent who asks her to be an informant on the case.”

Even as Daunis takes it upon herself to try and deal with a major community problem, she also has to contend with being an 18 year old who has lost her father under complex and harmful circumstances. She has to deal with a hockey injury, the expectations and weight of her community, and the effects of the meth addiction in the community directly. Daunis has to decide whether she wants to even attempt to be officially enrolled in the reservation as a recognized, blood member the community because her status is in question due to circumstances of her birth she had no control over.

There is a lot going on in this book, and a lot being communicated at a sociopolitical level. It’s honestly very impressive how different the perspective reads and how though provoking it is. Concepts divorced from western civilization are ingrained in the point of view. Especially regarding restorative Justice and other touchstones of socialization.

It’s also highly effective at showing how outsiders, even when they have good intentions, often do more harm than good because they do not understand the people or the community at a fundamental level.

The plot itself is straightforward and I think most readers will see each twist and turn that comes. But even when that’s the case, part of what makes this book work is how each aspect of the plot is interpreted by Daunis and what she does in response to the events.

That said, because the story is constructed in that way there is a degree of suspension of disbelief involved that is a bit beyond the genre. The plot does feel manufactured at points precisely because it is trying to communicate very specific things to the reader, and so it’s a bit strange in so far as character driven versus plot driven. The interplay of agency as it is taken from Daunis and clawed back, makes it feel like a constructed plot, rather than wholly organic at some times.

Daunis’s voice actually doesn’t sound, to me, like an 18 year old either; more like a 15 or 16 year old, but she couldn’t help the FBI without being 18 years old. And even that feels like the first major ask of the reader. But it’s early enough that it’s fine. When the impossible love story aspect starts and things snowball and become more and more dangerous, and when the voice doesn’t feel like it isn’t as complex and intelligent as an 18 year old, it cultivates some dissonance. You could probably go on Twitter and see 18 year olds use more complex diction and sentence structure, whereas this feels middle grade stuffed into a complex 18 year old who is described as being beyond her peers on academic levels.

However, the other effect the young voice has is a sort of childlike intensity when it comes to sheer earnestness, which leads to some impactful dialogue in its simplicity.

So I’m torn.

Luckily I try and rate books at an expectations level. Does this book do what it set out to do? Does it meet its pitch? Yes, and it exceeded it as well. Which makes it 4 stars for me. I didn’t love it because of the qualities I mentioned above, but it also surpassed the basic plot and some strange beats in its effort to communicate complex cultural aspects. It is Definitely worth picking up.