Fire Keeper's Daughter Review 6

Book: Fire Keeper’s Daughter Review 6

Author: Angeline Boulley

Publishers: Henry Holt and Company

Reviewed by: Nonqaba waka Msimang

“My life goes more smoothly when Hockey World and Regular World don’t overlap. Same with my Fontaine and Firekeeper worlds.” P.26.

That is what Daunis Fontaine the main character says to Lily her best friend. The Firekeeper world she’s referring to, is her father, an Ojibwe hockey player her French and Italian grandparents hated.

As a reader, I don’t agree with the above quote. The more I read, the more I’m convinced that the two worlds are joined at the hip. Daunis grew up in a white world, with her rich grandparents, her mother and Uncle David.

Uncle David died mysteriously while doing research on mushrooms. There’s a problem in the Hockey World. Meth, a hard drug laced with mushrooms is spreading in hockey towns and Indian reservations like Sugar Island, where Daunis' Ojibwe grandmother lives.

The book is 488 pages and what I’ve read so far, leads me to one conclusion, the two worlds Daunis tries so hard to keep separate, are twins. They are like cement that joins bricks to make a house.

I don’t have to agree with the author. I’m a reader, autonomous like the sun. I read and come to my own conclusion based on what I know and don’t know. But I love the author’s intention. Which is?

Like a good Canadian, I know very little about Anishinaabe: indigenous people, so the author makes me go back. Call me a crab. What did Daunis, the storyteller mean about angler fish? I go back to earlier pages. What did she say about mushrooms being parasites, growing on something else? I return to earlier pages.

Mushrooms. I don’t like them. Mama pulled our ears a hundred times not to eat ama-khowe the Zulu name for mushrooms. They are poisonous, she said.

In this book Fire Keeper’s Daughter, mushrooms are the concrete builders pour on the foundation before they build a house.

The author is devious, but her strategy works. Earlier pages are used to me now, I keep going back like someone who thinks she forgot to switch off the stove.

It is working because it is strengthening my belief that the book is about mushrooms and hockey, the two worlds, ‘…. my Fontaine and Firekeeper worlds,’ as Daunis puts it.

Miigwech. Thank you in Ojibwe.

By: Nonqaba waka Msimang.