![]() And soon after that, on my then-16-year-old son’s recommendation, I picked up Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. After that I took a peek inside John Green’s A Fault in Our Stars, a novel that had me rapt and moved. That’s always my default as a former literature student. Later, knowing that the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why had become such a controversial sensation, and thinking that my kids might want to watch it, and that I might want to watch it with them so that we could talk about it, I decided to read the book first. But I suppose that should not have been a surprise given that Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl is perhaps the first Holocaust book teenagers read. I learned a few years ago not to dismiss YA novels when I read The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, a book I hadn’t realized was YA until after I’d finished reading it and noticed the many accolades it had received as either a teen novel or a children’s novel, despite its subject matter – a young girl’s discovery of reading as perhaps her only saving grace during The Holocaust. I closed the book, wiped away tears, put my face in my hands to let a few more tears seep out, then made room inside myself for characters that will not soon leave me, the characters that inhabit the world of The Marrow Thieves, Cherie Dimaline’s powerful and moving 2017 novel. ![]() ![]() ![]() “…as long as there are dreamers left, there will never be want for a dream.” ![]()
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