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Bad Cree

A Novel

ebook
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks

2024 CBC CANADA READS SELECTION

AMAZON CANADA FIRST NOVEL AWARD SHORTLIST

A CBC BOOKS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

AN AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION ALEX AWARD WINNER

AURORA AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL SHORTLIST

RAKUTEN KOBO EMERGING WRITER PRIZE FOR LITERARY FICTION SHORTLIST

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

A haunting debut novel where dreams, family and spirits collide

Mackenzie, a Cree millennial, wakes up in her one-bedroom Vancouver apartment clutching a pine bough she had been holding in her dream just moments earlier. When she blinks, it disappears. But she can still smell the sharp pine scent in the air, the nearest pine tree a thousand kilometres away in the far reaches of Treaty 8.

Mackenzie continues to accidentally bring back items from her dreams, dreams that are eerily similar to real memories of her older sister and Kokum before their untimely deaths. As Mackenzie's life spirals into a living nightmare—crows are following her around and she's getting texts from her dead sister on the other side—it becomes clear that these dreams have terrifying, real-life consequences. Desperate for help, Mackenzie returns to her mother, sister, cousin, and aunties in her small Alberta hometown. Together, they try to uncover what is haunting Mackenzie before something irrevocable happens to anyone else around her.

Haunting, fierce, an ode to female relations and the strength found in kinship, Bad Cree is a gripping, arresting debut by an unforgettable voice.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from November 7, 2022
      Johns combines domestic realism and horror in her haunting debut, the story of a young Cree woman who’s distraught over the death of her sister. Mackenzie has fled from her home in northern Alberta to Vancouver, but the chilling dreams she’d hoped to escape follow her. Feeling increasingly threatened, she returns home, where her sister Sabrina died of a brain aneurysm shortly after their beloved grandmother died. There, she is reunited with Sabrina’s twin, Tracey, and their cousin Kassidy, as well as her mother and her aunties, and gradually discovers that they all have dreams that affect their waking lives in some way. As well, her recurring dream of drowning prompts Mackenzie to recall a summer day when Sabrina emerged from the woods looking glassy-eyed and somehow damaged, but she never learned what happened. Now, with Mackenzie’s dreams intensifying, the cousins conclude she must have encountered a “wheetigo,” a dangerous spirit, and they set out to destroy it before it comes for them. The novel serves as a window into a world where dreams intersect with waking reality, and where that unseen dimension is as much a part of the life of a tight-knit family and community as bingo, jokes, and video games. It works equally well as spine-tingling thriller and a touching meditation on grief.

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  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

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Languages

  • English

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