What an interesting gem of a book!!
First off, it’s a quick read and it’s small, so if you’re looking for something to bring on a camping trip or something, this would be a great choice.
Okay now on to the good stuff! This is every woman’s unspoken fantasy. It’s so dark and so deep we don’t even speak of it to each other. And it must be that much more satisfying for Indigenous women, since they are something like 19 times more likely to disappear and/or be the victims of sexual violence and murder. So this book is especially for Indigenous women, but also for all women. It’s the story of one woman who does everything right and plays by the rules and loves her man, but still can’t insulate herself from the horrible reality of men’s violence against women. In her case, it’s her brilliant lawyer of a sister. Even with her degrees and job and money and earned “legitimacy,” she still goes missing. (The two sisters are Indigenous women in prairie Canada, which is a very dangerous place for Indigenous women.) So our heroine is left to pick up the pieces. She’s at a sort of crossroads in her life: she still has all the trappings of her good life- husband, successful career as an artist, lovely home, etc- but she can not seem to get past her sister’s disappearance. And even more so, the indifference of authorities to her sister’s disappearance. At the same time, she begins to feel pushes and pulls from the spirit world that seem to be guiding her. And what they are guiding her to do is to find some justice where the justice system failed. She begins, very sweetly and surreptitiously to lure one (violent, un-caught, unpunished) man after another to his death. Then, she uses the kiln her husband built for her to burn them to ash and uses the ash in an ancient technique called bone black- it’s a way of using ash to glaze pottery. This becomes a whole new chapter in her pottery and people just love it- she becomes much more famous and sought after as an artist. But throughout, there’s an uneasy conflict: the reader loves what she’s doing on the one hand, because seeing justice meted out so skillfully and correctly is very satisfying, but on the other hand there’s the fear of Wren getting caught and also the fear that she is going insane or that what she’s doing is actually evil. (She is, after all, murdering these men in very creative and vengeful ways, then using their remains in her pottery!) And that fear of insanity and evil extends to ourselves as readers, because as I said you can’t help but be cheering her on and high-fiving her as she goes, but every so often you pause and realize, “I’m cheering on a serial killer.” Anyhoo, it’s a really important book with lots of crazy layers to unpack. I strongly urge anyone who’s ever been sick of sexual and other violence against women, anyone who cares about the genocidal crime that is the MMIWG2S (murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls and two-spirit individuals) problem in Canada (and probably elsewhere in the world), or just anyone with a kind of twisted mind to read this book. Goldeneagle has earned her stripes with this one!