Jaime M’s Reviews > The Strangers > Status Update

Oh boy.

So much to process. Spoiler 🚨

I’ll do a little processing at a time. Just having finished it, read a few other reviews because I thought I missed it somewhere about why Phoenix was in jail, why she’s on the sex offenders list and what exactly happened to the first Sparrow.
I’m glad I don’t know but had a deep dread AA I kept reading on right up until the end thinking it would.
come.

Cont…

Spoiler 🚨

“My Maman, your dear Auntt and Mamere, Rosemary, always said we had to work twice as hard to get anything. I always thought that was what it meant to be a halfbreed. That we were only ever going to be half as good, no matter what we did.”

🥺

SPOILER 🚨
This line will probably hit every Métis person in the gut (these lines after explaining the part about Annie’s life where she is followed by being driven out of various areas on her own homeland):“They never wanted us. They never acknowledged us or I coudes us. They wanted us to fade away. To die. But we didn’t…” & “we all fought for anything we could have. We worked for everything…cont..

Spoiler 🚨

Note to self: If the book Five Little Indians is the story of my father’s generation, than The Strangers is about the intersection of my father’s generation with the generations before and after closely followed throughout. This is an important Métis story right now. The “don’t look away” book; the deeper understanding of the messiness and hardening of people within a family from trauma.

Spoiler alert* 🚨

Let’s talk about Margaret.

Tough, harsh, trying to do the right thing, can’t get ahead - finds inter-generational wealth and decided to keep it. She decided not to be like her mother who helped her raise her children. She didn’t want to raise her own grandchildren. She wants something for herself for once with all that work she does for everyone else. Where does that leave everyone else?

As a parent struggling from the reflections of intergenerational motivations from white ppl of residential schools, the effects are resounding. Throughout this book, and as a survivor of those effects, I wish I could reach my hand out to everyone who feels this and I wish everyone the glue and magnetism to find whomever you’re looking for that was lost in this fucked up mess of genocidal after effects.