November 25, 2013
In 1885 Ontario, “white-skin” loggers are destroying the native Anishnaabe people’s land and claiming it as their own. Five-year-old Mishqua Ma’een’gun (Red Wolf) and other children are torn from their homes and forced to attend boarding school. Red Wolf is renamed George Grant and force-fed English and Christianity by the impatient and cruel school staff. Red Wolf is devastated, confused, and abused, his wolf pendant his only comfort. When he is finally allowed to visit his family, the adjustment is jarring, and his resentment grows. Meanwhile, Crooked Ear, a wolf that bonded with Red Wolf after the wolf’s family was murdered, searches for the child. Dance’s first novel addresses a horrific historical period and details Red Wolf’s harsh awakening in painful, hard-hitting scenes. Although the characters can be one-note and the narrative blunt (when Red Wolf’s father asks what he has learned at school the boy thinks, “I learned that I am a savage.... I learned to hide inside myself and pretend I wasn’t there”), readers will finish with a strong sense of the abuses suffered by natives at the hands of settlers. Ages 9–12.
December 1, 2014
A paint horse spends her life with several different owners on the Great Plains of the late 1800s. An orphaned foal, the paint is raised by a young Lakota boy and trained to hunt buffalo. When white soldiers raid the Lakota camp, the mare escapes and is caught by a white man, who also uses her to hunt buffalo. When the buffalo are gone, the man sells her to a homesteader hoping to raise cattle. After drought and harsh winters devastate his operation, the mare, now aged, ends up with a new homesteading family in western Canada. None of this is glossed over; animals die, often unpleasantly. Dance has done extensive research, which unfortunately impedes her story-or stories, as the novel suffers extremely from its lack of focus, jumping from episode to episode, narrator to narrator, and issue to issue without resolution or clarity. Readers will be frustrated by the almost-ending, in which the horse may be lost in a dust storm that may have destroyed a family's livelihood, or not. Concluding notes provide background on terminology, wild horses and homesteaders, and a timeline places the fictional events in context of history, much of it concerning atrocities and hardships suffered by Native Americans. Next time, Dance should focus on a single agenda or, better yet, tell a single story. (Historical fiction. 10-14)
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