Book review: The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline.

Summary

Humanity has nearly destroyed its world through global warming, but now an even greater evil lurks. The indigenous people of North America are being hunted and harvested for their bone marrow, which carries the key to recovering something the rest of the population has lost: the ability to dream. In this dark world, Frenchie and his companions struggle to survive as they make their way up north to the old lands. For now, survival means staying hidden--but what they don't know is that one of them holds the secret to defeating the marrow thieves.

Book review

The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline (Jacaranda), winner of the Kirkus Prize for Young Reader’s Literature, is a profound dystopia. It includes such topics as what happened in Canadian residential schools, the difficulties of indigenous people. It explores environmental issues, but also what fear, selfishness, and desperation can do to people. The text is vivid and perfect in its rendering of the language of a 16-year-old narrator. It gives us elements little by little so as to create suspense and expectations. 

The superb and very symbolic cover gives us hints of what we are going to find: mystery, wisdom, love of nature, secrets and revelations, link with infinity, power of living forces... with a stress on a blazing spine, the heart of the matter... A masterpiece which adults can read too, in line with the questionings of our time(s). 

Excerpt 

“Poisoning your own drinking water, changing the air so much the earth shook and melted and crumbled harvesting a race for medicine. How? How could this happen? Were they that much different from us? Would we be like them if we’d had a choice? Were they like us enough to let us live?

I thought about the sickness and the insanity that crept like bed bugs through families while they slept. What would I have done to save my parents or Mitch, given the chance? Would I have been able to trap a child, to do what, cut them into pieces? To boil them alive? I shuddered. I didn’t want to know what they did. And I didn’t want to know if I’d be capable of doing it.”