THE STONE CHILD

Twinned expeditions into the northern woods drive this third installment in The Misewa Saga.

When last readers saw Cree teen Morgan, she had just woken up next to Eli under the Great Tree that is their portal from their foster parents’ Winnipeg attic into the magical land of Askí. The colossal footprints that lead from her foster brother’s unresponsive body can only mean that the giant Mistapew has stolen Eli’s soul, and it’s up to Morgan to get it back. Soon Morgan and the squirrel Arik are trudging north with Eli’s inert body on a sled. They are accompanied by a White girl named Emily, a new school friend whom Morgan’s hastily brought through the portal to help (and who becomes something more than friend as they go). This journey is mirrored by a subsequent trip north on Earth so that Morgan can meet her kókom, the old woman who’s now her only surviving biological forbear. The shift from race-against-time fantasy adventure to a more mundane car excursion may throw readers, but Morgan’s grief at the newfound loss of the mother she’d been taken from years ago forms a unifying throughline. Robertson (Norway House Cree Nation) has a lot of narrative balls in the air in this outing, and they don’t all stay there—in particular, the time-travel mechanism becomes quite convoluted—but the story’s emotional arc shines true.

A mostly satisfying return.