The final Canada Reads 2022 book! I only got it 3 days before the debates, so . I didn’t finish it before it was voted off on Day 1, but actually almost DNF’d it. The start was challenging, with mentions of physical and sexual abuse of Clayon as a child, violence against his mother by her boyfriends, discussion about drugs and trauma. But the style was also difficult, written stream-of-consciousness with very low levels of organization or structure. Between the style and the content I found it hard to get engaged in the book. However, I found the last parts much better (although one friend thinks the opposite). 

The book is separated into four or five parts, starting with Clayton’s childhood and young adulthood, followed by stages of his growth as an environmental activist. Overall, the book has the repetition and circular style foundational to Indigenous storytelling, but this was not obvious in the first part. However, the stories and incidents brought up as incongruous anecdotes at the start come back over and over again through the successive parts of the book, showing us how they influenced Clayton throughout his life. At one point he says “I have spoken as an Indigenous man, as an activist, as someone seeking the correct spiritual path through a landscape pocked and pitted by traps [...] some of my own creation.” And in that line, I saw the book: over and over, he revisits his story from different points in his life, when he was following different paths: as the young Indigenous man not expected to be anything, as the activist fuelled by anger, as the man who reconnected with his spirituality and allowed it to change him. These paths weave in and out of each other, and he strays from them, but they are all connected.

I’m glad I persevered through the first part to see the big picture of the story. Be prepared to give yourself the time and space to read this book, but overall it's definitely worth getting through.