I'd say this was timely, but I think it's more that this kind of thing keeps happening, which is probably what vermette also thinks! It's very of the moment, but that moment being any time in the last twenty years, at the very least. (Indeed, between typing this in a draft, and hitting post, the whole Colby Wilkens thing happened.)

Two Metis sisters reckon with their white mother being a pretendian (white person pretending to be Indigenous), and with that being revealed in a national newspaper. They're also very much dealing with their own personal trashfires, and all the trauma that their mother's bullshit brings back up. It's told in short point of view chapters between the sisters (one an pottery artist in Winnipeg, and one an Indigenous Studies professor who just moved back home after fifteen years away), with a lot of flashbacks to growing up in an unstable household, and attempts to reconcile themselves to what's happening.

At times, the sisters reactions felt a little too polished, or maybe "well-placed" would be a better way of putting it. They're both believably flawed people, but it sometimes felt like they had done all the right things a little too well, and I would've maybe liked their relationship with their mother to feel more compromised. However, I can understand why vermette wanted a clean line between them. Certainly the message around double standards that judge Indigenous people more harshly, regardless of acting perfectly or not, was loud and clear.

I really liked positioning each sister in a different but ultimately complimentary relationship with her culture, one making art in a traditional way informed by archaeology and traditional stories and hands in the dirt, and the other studying narratives and theory, and trying to write her way into history. It was really neat to see them coming at their lives from those angles, while at the same time just feeling this deep hurt at what their mother did. Really thoughtful, well put together book. Also, had great family vibes and relationships between sisters, which I love too.

This is set in the same family as vermette's previous trilogy, but you don't need to have read that to follow this. Was nice to have queer and non-binary characters just chilling in the story.

The audio format did throw me a bit, since it wasn't quite a full cast drama, but it wasn't quite not that either. However, I'm here for Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers.