Mauwee Nibi - Crying Water

by Rejean Giguere

Warning - this book deals with a serious situation that is going on right now across Canada. It is not a book for the faint of heart. Contains violence, imagery, and adult situations. Every year more and more of Canada's Indigenous Women go missing. Every year some of them turn up dead, and some never turn up at all. What is happening to them? Rookie Billy Simon isn't sure he likes the first assignment he's been handed. He joined the RCMP to escape life on the reserve north of Thunder Bay, not to spend his new career looking into 'Indian Issues'. Now his commander wants him to go undercover on a freighter sailing the Great Lakes, looking for clues to Canada's missing Indigenous Women. Shy and quiet, eighteen-year old Shanya Marin let herself be talked into leaving the reserve to celebrate her birthday with friends in the city. Now she's in deep trouble, locked in a dark storeroom on a heaving boat headed in an unknown direction. She has nothing and no-one to rely on, except for her own inner resources and the lessons in the Aboriginal tales her mother had taught her over the years. Every day the huge steel freighters slide silently across Lake Superior, through the locks at Sault Saint Marie, and south into Canadian and American ports. They carry iron ore, coal, salt, and grain. And they carry much more. So many ships, so many ports. Can one Rookie cop figure out what is going on?

296 pages, Paperback

Published February 28, 2016

Reviews

[Peggy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think one of fiction's roles in society is to allow people to make an emotional connection with people and situations that they may never encounter in everyday life, helping you to empathize with and understand things from a different point of view.

This is one of those books.

Shanya's story grabs you and allows you to see and feel how she copes with her individual experience as a missing indigenous woman. Her strength and courage are tested as she has to make the choice to break for freedom when a rookie undercover cop stumbles across her during his investigation.

Heartbreaking and brave, vulnerable and proud at the same time. It's a tough book to read, but the feeling of catharsis at the end makes the journey worthwhile.