Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley is a debut novel following a young mixed race woman named Daunis living in an Ojibwe community, where she had set herself aside to care for her mother after her uncle died. The story begins when Daunis meets the new recruit for her brother’s hockey team, Jamie, and not long after witnesses a horrifying death that alters her entire life. The book follows the heavy theme of drug addiction and its impact on Native communities.
I will be quite honest and say that I struggle with mystery novels. So, my first and most glaringly obvious challenge with this book was that I simply don’t like the genre that it’s written in. But because it had been so highly recommended to me, and had won countless awards, including the 2022 Printz Award, I figured I would give it a try, and allow it the opportunity to broaden my horizons a bit. But, to my disappointment, it did not.
The topic it had been written about, meth addiction in Ojibwe communities, I thought was an important one to share, especially through YA literature, and clearly it was close to home for Boulley, who lives in an Ojibwe community in upper Michigan herself. It was filled with details about everyday Ojibwe life, and the culture that Daunis is a part of, as well as her insecurity with being mixed. Boulley wove these details in beautifully, in a way that wasn’t painfully chock full of information or felt like she was outright trying to teach me about her culture. It felt very easily realistic.
I did not enjoy the undercover police aspect very much, and it annoyed me because, to me, it seemed very far-fetched—not the investigation but how they planned to go about it, and I got frequently irritated at the decisions they were making, and Daunis’ part in it. That aspect of the book just overall felt somewhat off to me, which was disappointing considering its prevalence in the book
I was also not a fan of the pacing of the book, and I found myself confused with the timeline as well as the importance of scenes that Boulley had written that seemed fairly unnecessary to the plot. I just wanted there to be more, which I couldn’t get from Daunis’ perspective. When there is suspense and mystery in a book, I tend to prefer a faster pace in order to stay engaged, which this book didn’t really give me. I instead found myself itching for more every time I turned the page.
I started reading Firekeeper’s Daughter early in December and didn’t even get halfway through it until February. I thought it was because I had fallen into a reading slump, but as more time went on (and the more books I read aside from it) I realized that it just wasn’t keeping my attention like I wanted it to. Which made me feel guilty because of how much the book had been praised and loved by so many. I pushed myself to finish it, but the book is one that, in another instance, I would have given up on. Firekeeper’s Daughter is an objectively great novel, and for Boulley’s debut, it’s truly incredible and deserving of the awards it received, but I had difficulty appreciating it, though I wish I could.