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Bad Cree

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

In this gripping debut, a young Cree woman's dreams lead her on a perilous journey of self-discovery that ultimately forces her to confront the toll of a legacy of violence on her family, her community, and the land they call home.

When Mackenzie wakes up with a severed crow's head in her hands, she panics. Only moments earlier she had been fending off masses of birds in a snow-covered forest. In bed, when she blinks, the head disappears.

Night after night, Mackenzie's dreams return her to a memory from before her sister Sabrina's untimely death: a weekend at the family's lakefront campsite, long obscured by a fog of guilt. But when the waking world starts closing in, too — crows stalk her every move around the city; she gets threatening text messages from someone claiming to be Sabrina — Mackenzie knows this is more than she can handle alone.

Travelling north to her rural hometown in Alberta, she finds her family still steeped in the same grief that she ran away to Vancouver to escape. They welcome her back, but their shaky reunion only seems to intensify her dreams — and make them more dangerous.

What really happened that night at the lake, and what did it have to do with Sabrina's death? Only a bad Cree would put their family at risk, but what if whatever has been calling Mackenzie home was already inside her?

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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
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Languages

  • English

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