Firekeeper's Daughter

Daunis is 18 years old and of mixed heritage-part Ojibwe Indian and part American but committed to her First Nation community. When it is threatened she knows that despite the danger she must step up and try to save what is most dear to her, whatever the risk.
After a single page of prophetic high tension the first nine chapters of the book skilfully paint in the details of the town and of the community and lay the groundwork for characters and their relationships. Boulley doesn’t overwhelm the reader with detail but leads the way through the intricacies and connections – immersing, not superimposing. This is the reason why the events glimpsed in the first page come as such a shock – they are happening to people we have come to know and care about. Daunis’ best friend Lily is shot and killed in front of her by Travis, Lily’s ex-boyfriend, who is high on crystal meth and who immediately afterwards turns the gun on himself.
The deaths plunge the community into shock, its traditions and behavioural codes violated. Daunis is offered the chance to help to put things right as part of a covert FBI operation to discover who is manufacturing and distributing the drugs which are destroying young lives. After two more of her friends die she agrees to help-her cover as the girlfriend of Jamie, an apparent member of a visiting ice-hockey team who is FBI and her knowledge from her aptitude in chemistry and her intimate understanding of Ojibwe traditional medicine.
The plot weaves, ducks and dives, but always convincingly and always a mixture of the beliefs and customs of the Ojibwe and of white American culture. The reader is detective and observer, placed at the heart of Daunis’ moral dilemmas and the dangers she finds herself in. Her family and the closest members of her Ojibwe community-notably strong, fearless and good-hearted women-bring elements of sassy certainty and tribal wisdom. The poignancy of the story is the love which slowly grows between Jamie and Daunis and which can never be fully realised.
When events are brought to their shocking and unexpected conclusion Daunis can again concentrate on her own life and combine her love of chemistry and biology and of traditional medicine in a university course which will also allow her time to study with the tribe’s healer, to become her apprentice, to fight for ‘all the girls and women pushed into the abyss of expendability and invisibility.’