Wesselhoff &
Hunting by Stars (a Marrow Thieves Novel) by Cherie Dimaline

         This book showed up on one of the celebrity book clubs I follow, I think it was Reese Witherspoon’s young adult club.  I had placed a hold on it on my library’s website and it actually came off hold pretty quickly.  Then I downloaded it and immediately found it was the second in a duology.  Well poop.  So I returned it and put the first one on hold.  I wasn’t all that impressed with the first one, largely because it was aimed at young adults.  I felt, strongly, that some of the themes and violence might be a bit much for some of those readers.  Then I though to myself that I might be getting a little stuck in my mind as I get older.  When my daughters were in 8th grade, they read books that were hugely inappropriate and I didn’t bat an eyelash, so why now would I have a change of heart?  I’m still pondering that question. 

            This is a dystopian society.  It’s not easy to figure out exactly what happened, but eventually I realized that most of the people alive had stopped being able to dream…and it was killing them.  At some point, non-indigenous people realized that the indigenous people were still capable of dreaming, so they started hunting the dreamers and trying to “harvest” their dreams by draining them of their bone marrow (the first book is called The Marrow Thieves).  The premise is kinda gruesome.  The indigenous people were captured and placed into “schools,” much like what happened to them from the beginning of the 19th century all the way through 1970.  It was an interesting comparison that could be useful in a US/North American history class.  Those indigenous that managed to evade capture banded together and tried everything they could to fight for their lives, being branded by the non-indigenous as savages.  Again, there’s some parallels there. 

            I really enjoyed how this book sets the guidelines for what, exactly, counts as family.  The characters here might not be blood related, but the experiences they shared solidified the roles they will forever play in each other’s lives.  I was pleased with how the story played itself out, calling on history to tell a futuristic story, almost like a warning perhaps.  While it took me a while to become fully invested in this duology, I thoroughly enjoyed them both. 

good and powerful, but made me real sad. the content is much more intense than the marrow thieves (but definitely not in a bad way).