Hunting by Stars by Cherie Dimaline fleshes out the story first introduced in The Marrow Thieves yet didn’t have the dream elements that made my read of the earlier novel so difficult. Action in Hunting by Stars takes place in real time however that didn’t make me like the novel more than Marrow. In this work Dimaline wrote a full 390 pages which, as I also noted in the earlier work, were full of beautiful imagery and simile. I loved the description of the moon here:
“The sky was navy, but in layers, and the moon was low and slight. Tonight, that moon was a gentle curve of creamy white. Tonight, the moon was the rib sawed from the scaffold of Miig’s chest and ripped out. Tonight, it wasn’t something in the sky; it was a spot taken out of it. It was a hole. It was loss, a rib-shaped absence.”
I liked Dimaline’s electric imagery here:
“It was on day fifteen that I finally saw Mitch again. After so many hours spent stitching careful words around electric panic to keep myself from shorting out, I was genuinely happy to see him.”
The action centres on a group on the run from those who are after their marrow. The indigenous peoples have retained their capacity to dream, which the non-indigenous population believes can be found by extracting their marrow. French (known as Frenchie in The Marrow Thieves) is now seventeen and is captured by the Recruiters, whose job is to fill the residential schools who will harvest the marrow from its victims. The members of French’s group are imprisoned in these schools, experimented upon and plot an escape.
Those on the run always had to beware of traitors, those indigenous people who do the work of the oppressors. On numerous occasions French and his team stumble across small forest settlements or campsites yet cannot approach any of them without investigating the situation and who lives there first.
When a bear trap clamps down on the leg of Derrick, it was a cringeworthy experience to get through the passage. I couldn’t stop squirming as I read about the razor-sharp teeth sawing into Derrick’s flesh and the subsequent attempts to remove the rusty trap. I wonder if Dimaline had personal experience with such a trap or knew someone who had unfortunately been snared by one.
One of the characters, named Nam, used the third-person plural pronoun as a singular to refer to herself. I found the use of they/them to refer to her especially confusing when Nam was within a group. I always had to reread passages that referred to they/them as I didn’t know who the antecedent was. Was it deliberate of Dimaline to name Nam as she did, the word man spelled backwards?
I noticed several verb errors, ones where it appeared that the author initially chose a perfect or pluperfect yet ultimately selected the imperfect, meanwhile leaving one part of the compound verb dangling. She also misspelled lightening for lightning. The page numbers were in the smallest font at the bottom of each page. In compiling and reviewing my notes for this review I needed a magnifying glass to identify the location of passages.
I chose to read both this novel and The Marrow Thieves because a relative asked me to give my opinions of each. She was considering giving the books as Christmas gifts. I had only read The Marrow Thieves in time for the holiday in 2021. Unfortunately I didn’t care for it nor Hunting by Stars, however I did spend the same length of time reading the longer book as I did with the earlier shorter one, so Stars had some pull to make me want to continue reading about French and his group.