QAQAVII

Constantly moving from one town to the next with her frightened single mother, Emmylou desperately wants real friends.

She is only 15, yet when her mother moves them to Churchill, Manitoba, to wait tables in a tourist town, she has Emmylou drop out of school and work too. Studying on her own, young Emmylou begins to take an interest in local history. Her greatest lessons, however, come via the Indigenous family who take her under their wing. She makes friends with handsome Barnabas, an Inuk teenager planning to compete in an ambitious race, and his sled dog Qaqavii. She learns the locals’ lifestyle as well as about the tragic history of prejudice and dispossession they have faced. The book deals powerfully with events experienced by the Inuk, also teaching readers about the clothing, hunting, and culture of dog sledding. Perhaps because of her itinerant lifestyle, Emmylou is drawn to Barnabas and his deep connection to the land. Unfortunately, their connective displacement is never explicitly discussed because Emmylou envisions Barnabas as rooted despite his ancestral loss. Rather than representing a failure on the part of the author, it feels as if she keeps a respectful distance from a culture that is not her own by rendering the world exclusively from the perspective of the white outsider, Emmylou.

A lonely teen heals herself with the help of an Inuk boy and his dogs.