FIREWEED

A white woman searches for her missing First Nations neighbor in this debut novel set in Prince George, British Columbia.

When 24-year-old Beth Tremblay—a white college graduate—goes missing in the summer of 2001, the Prince George Citizen and the TV news are all over the story, and a billboard advertises a reward for her return. But when widowed mother Rachelle Murphy—“the only Indian in the neighborhood,” according to narrator Jenny Hayes—vanishes soon after, there’s no public outcry. That’s because when Indigenous women disappear, the assumption is that they’re prostitutes who have been killed on the job; as one of Jenny’s friends shruggingly puts it, “Squaws…Working the highway. Like the ones around Fort George Park. Occupational hazard, I guess.” Before Rachelle’s disappearance, she and Jenny, who is resigned to the idea that people see her as “white trash who never left PG,” were taking the first tentative steps toward friendship. (Jenny doesn’t tell her coal miner husband, who wouldn’t understand why she would want to have “a cup of coffee with the welfare mom.”) Achingly childless, Jenny has witnessed Rachelle’s good parenting and is certain that her neighbor wouldn’t have just abandoned her two little girls at their day care center. The novel has the signposts of a mystery, especially after Jenny starts playing detective, and the heart of a social novel, given its preoccupations with racism, classism, misogyny, and environmental havoc. The story could have used some tightening, and the reader’s patience may be tested whenever naivete or dopiness on Jenny’s part is required to steer the plot in a particular direction. But the novel doesn’t ultimately go where the reader will expect it to, and the occasional straining for simile is offset by the overall skillful prose throughout.

A full-bodied awakening-to-injustice novel.