Sisters in the Wind by Angeline Boulley
Angeline Boulley is so consistently good. “Sisters in the Wind” is the third book I’ve read of hers, after “The Firekeeper’s Daughter” and “Warrior Girl Unearthed,” and I worried she wouldn’t be able to keep it up, but she did. She totally did. Sometimes when authors go back to the same well of characters over and over it doesn’t work, but then just often maybe it does — it certainly works for Elizabeth Strout, it’s working for Shannon Bowring.
It was nice to be in Daunis’s (from “The Firekeeper’s Daughter”) company again, even if she wasn’t the main character. The main character is Lucy Smith and she’s a strong, intelligent young woman with secrets. A lot of secrets. They come out gradually in a way that made sense to me because Lucy was scared, very scared of whomever was chasing her. Too scared to tell us right away and so she had to tell everything else that came before first.
Lucy is new to the Boulley universe but she shares a mother with Lily, Daunis’s best friend from “The Firekeeper’s Daughter.” Lucy never knew her Ojibwe mother and was raised by her white father who was mostly a decent man and dad, but who lied to Lucy about her native background. Lucy is on her own when we meet her and just learning about who she is, partly from meeting Daunis and Jamie. Jamie is also from “The Firekeeper’s Daughter,” now a few years older and part of an organization that seeks to reunite indigenous children with their native families. He comes looking for Lucy to reunite her with her family and tribe.
There’s a lot of information in this book about ICWA, the Indian Child Welfare Act, which was established in 1978 to protect native children in adoption cases and ideally keep them with their tribe, if they’re unable to stay with their biological families. After her father died, ICWA was not followed and Lucy was placed in a foster home. More broadly, “Sisters in the Wind” is about the foster care system and the abuses that occur there, but the novel is told as a fast-paced thriller turned murder mystery.
So Lucy is on the run from something in her past, something she experienced in foster care, but it’s hard to see what as we see in flashbacks how she traveled from one foster home to another over the previous five years, three homes in total. In the present, Jamie and Daunis are caring for Lucy after she sustains a serious injury when the diner she was working in was bombed. Can Lucy learn to trust Daunis and Jamie enough to tell them about her past and let them help her not just heal from her immediate injury, but from all her injuries? Or will she try to keep running until her past catches up with her?
There’s so much going on in this book, so many threads to pull. Boulley is such a talent. She keeps all these threads in check and makes you fall in love with Lucy and Daunis and Jamie at the same time. She shows you the beauty in every situation. Even the darkest moments shine with a relationship Lucy has built or an appreciation for nature. The foster homes are not all bad, and in the last, the problem is not immediate apparent. A pervasive sense of dread hangs over the story as Lucy, and we, try to put a finger on exactly what is wrong. When the truth finally reveals itself, ooh boy, it’s a doozy.