Description
Daunis Fontaine is torn between two worlds and families: her white French/Italian mother’s side and her father’s Ojibwe Firekeeper’s side. Before the story even begins in Firekeeper’s Daughter, Daunis has experienced major loss and grief. Her father died when she was seven years old, her Uncle David died just a few months before the story begins, and her grandmother had a stroke shortly after Uncle David’s death. Daunis defers her upcoming enrollment at the University of Michigan to stay with her mother, who has taken both losing her brother and her mother’s illness very hard.
As the pages slowly introduce the characters, there is a sense that something bad is at play in this community—Daunis’s best friend Lily’s ex-boyfriend is struggling with drugs, there is political unrest as the tribal election is underway, and it isn’t completely clear yet what happened to Uncle David. According to Daunis’s Gramma Pearl, bad things always happen to people in groups of three.
Daunis’s brother Levi, the “hockey god,” asks her to befriend the new kid on the team, Jamie Johnson. Jamie and his uncle Ron have moved to town for Ron to fill Daunis’s Uncle David’s teaching position at the high school. As Daunis becomes close to Jamie, she realizes that his story just doesn’t add up. While Jamie has question after question for Daunis about her life and family, he reveals very little about himself.
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