Natsumi’s Reviews > Mask of the Deer Woman > Status Update

"If you want to find a girl," the old woman called,
"you should follow a man."

Maybe angry women were actually just hungry. Fucking hungry. Tired of counting and keeping track and doing it right and smiling when in the end it didn’t matter anyway. We washed our faces and put on lipstick and wore uncomfortable shoes and didn’t eat dessert and we fucking smiled and smiled and smiled until our interior spaces became molten.

She would never feel like she belonged on the rez. There was a big difference between having enough heritage to get a rez job and being part of the community.

Worse, she knew the BIA didn't have a comprehensive national database to track missing Indigenous women, even though Indigenous women were seven times more likely to be murdered than white women.
The ratio of Indigenous women who were missing was even higher.

She'd wanted to remain wary of him, but the bloody scene had taken all the fight out of him. The dog's death had closed him off like a slammed door.

"Deer Woman," said the elder, pointing to a carved wooden mask on the wall. Starr eyed its oblong ears and long face slit horizontally by sharp carved teeth. "She can shift from one world to another, from a woman to a deer. Alert and cautious, delicate and deadly, she tramples people to death. Vengeance."

Holder's adolescence was measured in loss: a father scattered, a mother flown, a grandmother curled so far inward she vibrated with anger.

The woman had already retreated from the doorway to somewhere inside and was talking too fast, her sentences running together like a stream Starr wasn't ready to dip a toe into-much less leap.