Reading Harder

Talaga gives a voice to Indigenous children whose deaths were never properly explained. She makes the case about how the lives of the Indigenous people of Canada have never been treated equally. This is easily seen in how missing cases and deaths of Indigenous people have a history of not being properly investigated. The 1966 case of Chanie Wenjack who froze to death at the age of twelve after having run away from a residential school is an example of this. Although there was an inquest and recommendations given to prevent it from happening again, none of it was taken seriously.

Decades later, seven Indigenous high schoolers died in Thunder Bay, Ontario hundreds of miles away from their families. A few were found in rivers, a couple died in their boarding houses, and one disappeared into the freezing night. Seven years after the first child, Jethro Anderson, was found, an investigation was finally ordered in response to Reggie Bushie’s death. Talaga focuses on the Northern City of Thunder Bay, but its history of handling Indigenous children and people is representative of Canada as whole.

Leduc examines the role fairy tales have played in society’s view of disability. Throughout her book, she critiques tales that range from the Brothers Grimm to modern Disney iterations, showing how happiness has only ever been thought to be for beautiful, able-bodied people. It’s interesting how every culture has myths, and how much these stories are meant to shape the cultures in turn. Many of the myths from the Disney fairy tales that Leduc discusses here were borrowed from other continents, so the views regarding disability didn’t originate with the entertainment company, but I wonder just how much actually seeing this kind of discrimination play out in the form of movies made them that much harder to dispel.

Broome frames his memoir around Gwendolyn Brook’s poem “We Real Cool.” In it, he recounts his experiences growing up in Ohio as a dark-skinned, queer Black kid. As you might have imagined, this was an experience was full of homophobia, racism, and even abuse from his father. He further describes how he used sex and drugs to self soothe to disastrous effects in this beautifully written memoir that just won a Kirkus Prize.

Side note: The book blurb describes Brook’s poem as a “loving ode to Black boyhood,” which I think is… interesting. Reading the poem gives me anything but Black joy vibes, but this isn’t the first time I’ve seen blurbs use examples of other well-known Black art to describe Black books, even when it doesn’t exactly fit (all the “just like the movie Get Out” books, I’m looking at you). Let me know what y’all think about this.