by Angeline Boulley ★★★☆☆
Angeline Boulley's debut novel, Firekeeper's Daughter, took her 10 years to write, and she packed a ton into it -- a coming of age story, a multi-murder mystery, an undercover FBI investigation into a secret drug ring, missing Native women, and more. While I couldn't help but think that Boulley was unconsciously including everything she could into this project that took a decade to create, it all worked, and it was my #5 book of last year.
By comparison, Warrior Girl Unearthed flowed from Boulley in just a year. In the author's note, she attributes the idea to a tweet she saw in 2018, where the story was like "a Lara Croft movie, 'but she's native and returning artifacts that museums stole'." And thus Warrior Girl Unearthed was conceived.
Our main protagonist -- or Lara Croft, if you will -- is Perry Firekeeper-Birch, niece to Daunis Fontaine (the heroine of Firekeeper's Daughter). The novel takes place in 2014, ten years after Firekeeper's Daughter. We met Perry and her twin sister Pauline briefly in Firekeeper's Daughter, but as six-year-olds in that novel they didn't have much of a role to play. Now, at age 16, Perry can take center stage. However, Perry is no Lara Croft.
After a car accident puts her in debt and ruins her "Summer of Slack", Perry is accepted into the Kinomagge Summer Internship Program. It will pay enough to cover the car repairs she owes, but from the jump Perry is looking to find a way out of it and into a different job, or ideally just spend her summer fishing. To say Perry is a bit rough around the edges and childish would be an understatement. She's unmotivated, contentious, brash, selfish, and immature. She's surrounded by people who try to help her, and yet she continuously rebuffs their assistance and regularly makes self-centered choices.
Her first internship post begins with "Kooky" Cooper Turtle at the Cultural Learning Center. Cooper is passionate about locating Ojibwe ancestors' remains and returning them to the care of the Ojibwe tribe, and he helps bring Perry up to speed on things like NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Before long, they find themselves embroiled in a negotiation to return some such remains, and Perry starts to come alive with a purpose and a passion for this specific thing, so much so that she takes the return of those ancestors into her own hands, by any means necessary.
I really wanted to like this novel, but I struggled with it, and perhaps it suffers mostly from comparison to Firekeeper's Daughter, and even more from comparing Daunis to Perry. Daunis had a solid and noble core, and even in moments when she stumbled in her coming-of-age story, you wanted to root for her throughout the novel. I struggled to truly cheer for Perry (or even like her, if I'm being honest), and while she finally finds something to be passionate about with the repatriation of her ancestors, she still makes selfish and immature choices throughout the novel. Perhaps that's the point -- she's only 16 -- and while there's some learning and growth throughout the novel, I wanted to see more from her. While she improves by the end of the book, it felt like she was making some better choices more because she thought that's what she should probably do, rather than from a position of actual moral growth.
Beyond the unsatisfying growth of Perry, there were broader issues with the novel. While Firekeeper's Daughter felt broad but also complex and complete, there are a lot of components of Warrior Girl Unearthed that felt thrown in or just incompletely realized. Boulley tries to keep the MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women) thread going, but it feels like more of an afterthought throughout the majority of the novel. There's a love interest angle that isn't fully explored. Even the title character -- the remains of "Warrior Girl" -- becomes a mostly an unrealized component of the story. Of course, I suspect Boulley's intention was for Perry to be the true "Warrior Girl Unearthed", but Perry is so far from a warrior, even by the end, that that feels somewhat insulting.
In some ways it seems like Boulley had content for an impassioned op-ed about the unjust processes and delays in repatriating artifacts and ancestors to Native communities, and she decided to try to turn that into a fictional novel with that issue at its core. Unfortunately, it comes off as preachy and incomplete, and while she'll likely reach more eyeballs this way, I have to believe a long-form op-ed would have been the way to go. Like with Firekeeper's Daughter, I learned a lot about a subject I knew very little about; unlike that novel, I don't think the sub-par fictional packaging around a very real issue gave the issue the treatment it deserved.
By all means, make time to read Firekeeper's Daughter (it's really good!); as for Warrior Girl Unearthed, you can skip it.