I’m not sure I’ve read a book, especially in such short a text, despite it being 350 pages, the audiobook is 3 hours and change, that can communicate so much about people as ecology and community.

With sparse words and highly effective use of white space to give, sometimes just a sentence a much needed pause and breath. There’s a kind of weight to every page that feels like the author has actually weighed it as too heavy or too light and how much white space it needs between this vignette or fragmentation or whatever you’d like to call it, to “make the point” of it especially keen.

We follow 7 different people in a atemporal manner and the most striking things to me is how much it reinforces it’s non-western-centric gaze while situating a few of the character in western culture. You would think the urban environment would radically alter the characterization of a character in some kind of dichotomy, but it, again, simply reinforces the larger community. Because even in the urban, where nature is harder to find, sure, there is obviously still natural elements, captured in raccoons or the local park. It can’t ever be stamped out, though it is always and forever classified as inferior by the legitimately sociopathic institutions western society, and so we all, to some degree, must worship.

As it goes on this social construction that delineates the differences between people and animals and trees, and basically anything of nature—simply isn’t even recognized as a notion to confront. It is so baseless it has no air. Instead we see how the people perceive no differences, and either does nature. In many ways, all natural aspects of people are Trees or Geese or Raccoons. Just because we have chosen not to internalize the natural in our socio-political constructs does not mean that others have.

Many indigenous languages don’t distinguish between gender and the words that are synonymous have a great deal more sense than English and other languages. And so the people here and they, just as the trees and the raccoons, and so on. I was very happy to see the Dene given some space, with those correlations reinforcing aspects of this story telegraphing that this is outside the prescriptive, western bounds of how to tell story. How to talk about a person or a people or a character. How to communicate what is intrinsic and fundamental to them. And how long that “needs” to take. Just a stunning work. I have no idea why this wasn’t on more Canadian prize lists. It better be on the next Canada Reads, I will say that.