DAUGHTERS of the DEER

Danielle Daniel. DAUGHTERS OF THE DEER. Random House, 2022.

Highly recommended by a trusted writer friend. In fact, he loaned me his library copy for me to return, now that there are no longer late fees.

I have two hesitations in general. The first, my distrust of historical fiction as my mind is always questioning--was it really like that or is this a 21st century imagining of what it was like? The acknowledgements suggest that this writer has done important secondary research on New France in the 1600s. And the Indigenous world view is convincingly presented although I have no way to assess how authentic that is. The second hesitation is my leeriness about "trends" in society reflected a few years later in "trends" in publishing. The trend in this book is the losses inflicted on Indigenous women and "others" especially "two-spirit" or in this case, lesbian-leaning girls who become lovers. The good thing is that the protagonist, Marie's family, never stops loving her. The tension centres around the way the new religion insisted on rejecting some people and making so many, non-males, lesser than they had been before contact and conversion. Once I let the river take me, the story hook me, I was able to float, luxuriate in the beauty of the land and its many "People".