laundry0099@bookwyrm.social reviewed How We Go Home by Sara Sinclair
An important book, not my favorite format
4 stars
I didn’t know what to expect when I picked up this book. So I was surprised to find that it is essentially a series of verbal interviews transcribed into a book. There are some editorial explanations throughout, which were helpful at first, but after a while they became a bit repetitive.
All of the stories are eye opening. I am very glad I read it. The amount of poverty and abuse faced by First Nations people is something I never hear about, and I had no idea how pervasive it is. And the most tragic part is that it was all engineered by the US and Canadian governments.
What I disliked about this book was simply how little time we get to spend with each narrator. You start a chapter with a new face, you get the cliff notes version of their life story, and then you move …
I didn’t know what to expect when I picked up this book. So I was surprised to find that it is essentially a series of verbal interviews transcribed into a book. There are some editorial explanations throughout, which were helpful at first, but after a while they became a bit repetitive.
All of the stories are eye opening. I am very glad I read it. The amount of poverty and abuse faced by First Nations people is something I never hear about, and I had no idea how pervasive it is. And the most tragic part is that it was all engineered by the US and Canadian governments.
What I disliked about this book was simply how little time we get to spend with each narrator. You start a chapter with a new face, you get the cliff notes version of their life story, and then you move on to the next one. I would have liked more of an overarching narrative structure, or at least a deeper, more nuanced exploration of the issues facing any of the interviewees.
But that is just a personal taste issue. This book sets out to tell the stories of the people who agreed to be interviewed and it does that in a beautiful way. I highly recommend it. The nice thing about the format is that it is easy to pick it up and read one chapter and then put it back down.