Reading Wednesday
Dec. 8th, 2021 05:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyCurrently reading/just finished: In Search of April Raintree by Beatrice Culleton Mosionier. I'm reading the critical edition, which includes the unabridged novel and essays analyzing it. So while I'm finished the book, I have one or two essays left, which I'll probably read tonight.
There's a lot to unpack here. Spoilers for a book that's almost four decades old, I guess?
Plot-wise, it's deceptively simple: April and Cheryl Raintree, two Métis sisters, are removed from their alcoholic parents' home and placed in separate foster care homes. April is white-passing and terrified of falling victim to "native girl syndrome," as her social worker puts it. rejects her Indigenous heritage, instead trying to survive in mainstream white society. Cheryl is unmistakably Indigenous, and embraces her Métis heritage. The two drift apart and draw closer over the years, while each keeps life-and-death secrets from the other. April lets her younger sister believe that their parents were ill rather than alcoholics. Cheryl tracks down her father and learns that her mother committed suicide, and as she's drawn into her father's world, becomes a sex worker and an alcoholic, gets pregnant, and abandons the child. These secrets collide when April is mistaken for Cheryl by a group of young men out for revenge and violently raped. She succeeds and the surviving rapists are convicted, but during the trial Cheryl's sex work history is revealed, and the sisters become alienated as a result. Cheryl kills herself and April, through her diaries, learns that she has a nephew and adopts him, finally embracing her family and heritage.
The book is in April's first person POV. There's a weird amount of emphasis in the critical essays about the "artlessness" of the prose, which strikes me as interesting. It's true in that the prose is very flat and straightforward, but while that was apparently exceptional in YA literature in 1983, it's so standard in contemporary YA that this wouldn't have stood out to me at all. Today's teenagers aren't expected to have to unpack a metaphor while parsing out a story, but I guess they were back then.The literary value is all in complexities of identity and theme and the author's refusal to tie up these complexities in a straightforward message or moral. It's unsettling and uncomfortable to read. For me, that artlessness seems very intentional, as the work of an author unwilling to pull punches or soften the brutal racism in metaphor or allusion.
One of the essays mentioned that in the version edited for teenage readers, they have expunged the graphic sexual assault scene but not the slurs. Which says a lot about what's acceptable in polite Canadian society, really.
At any rate, I feel like it was a deficiency on my part that I hadn't read it, and I am glad to have corrected that deficiency.
There's a lot to unpack here. Spoilers for a book that's almost four decades old, I guess?
Plot-wise, it's deceptively simple: April and Cheryl Raintree, two Métis sisters, are removed from their alcoholic parents' home and placed in separate foster care homes. April is white-passing and terrified of falling victim to "native girl syndrome," as her social worker puts it. rejects her Indigenous heritage, instead trying to survive in mainstream white society. Cheryl is unmistakably Indigenous, and embraces her Métis heritage. The two drift apart and draw closer over the years, while each keeps life-and-death secrets from the other. April lets her younger sister believe that their parents were ill rather than alcoholics. Cheryl tracks down her father and learns that her mother committed suicide, and as she's drawn into her father's world, becomes a sex worker and an alcoholic, gets pregnant, and abandons the child. These secrets collide when April is mistaken for Cheryl by a group of young men out for revenge and violently raped. She succeeds and the surviving rapists are convicted, but during the trial Cheryl's sex work history is revealed, and the sisters become alienated as a result. Cheryl kills herself and April, through her diaries, learns that she has a nephew and adopts him, finally embracing her family and heritage.
The book is in April's first person POV. There's a weird amount of emphasis in the critical essays about the "artlessness" of the prose, which strikes me as interesting. It's true in that the prose is very flat and straightforward, but while that was apparently exceptional in YA literature in 1983, it's so standard in contemporary YA that this wouldn't have stood out to me at all. Today's teenagers aren't expected to have to unpack a metaphor while parsing out a story, but I guess they were back then.The literary value is all in complexities of identity and theme and the author's refusal to tie up these complexities in a straightforward message or moral. It's unsettling and uncomfortable to read. For me, that artlessness seems very intentional, as the work of an author unwilling to pull punches or soften the brutal racism in metaphor or allusion.
One of the essays mentioned that in the version edited for teenage readers, they have expunged the graphic sexual assault scene but not the slurs. Which says a lot about what's acceptable in polite Canadian society, really.
At any rate, I feel like it was a deficiency on my part that I hadn't read it, and I am glad to have corrected that deficiency.
no subject
Date: 2021-12-09 12:29 am (UTC)This doesn't sound like a book I'd like at all but I liked this post
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Date: 2021-12-09 12:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-09 12:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-09 01:24 am (UTC)(I would not include this one as suffering—it's high quality.)
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Date: 2021-12-09 02:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-09 02:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-09 02:18 am (UTC)