Thank you to NetGalley and the Publishers for approving me for this eARC in exchange for an honest review. This, as the summary says, is a young adult thriller about a Native teen who witnesses the murder of her best friend by her boyfriend that was addicted to drugs. Daunis is no stranger to loss. She’s lost her father, her uncle, and her GrandMary isn’t doing very well. She’s lived a hard life. But she’s so strong because of that. She has such a big heart. But I think my favorite thing about Daunis was her brain. She’s so incredibly smart. I liked following her as she put the pieces together of the investigation that she’s helping the FBI with. Seeing her use her knowledge of the tribe and her culture to figure out what and who was bringing drugs into her community. It was a heart wrenching story about a community being changed by drugs, about losing friends you never thought would be involved, and how betrayal can come from those you thought closest.
I loved learning about Daunis’s experiences being Native. It was really interesting to see her life as an outsider that everyone knows isn’t really an outsider. The community she is a part of is one that has issues, like most, but is filled with so much history and culture that I really enjoyed reading about it.
I feel like I’m not accurately explaining how much I loved this book. It was heart wrenching, but I absolutely could not put it down. I definitely recommend this book to anyone that loves a good YA mystery/thriller. I had so many theories about what was happening and was almost never right. The story was complex, with several different things going on in the story. Daunis had family issues, there was the investigation, but there was also the question of her future and college and why she didn’t play hockey anymore. I think this was all tied together wonderfully, it wasn’t too much for one story, it was all connected. I really cannot say enough good things about this book. This is a new release you don’t want to miss.

The hype I heard of this book was what intrigued me the most, as an avid fan of Veronica Mars-like story lines... But the writing just felt very stilted and distracting at times. Most people probably wouldn't have noticed, but the lack of complex sentence structures hindered my reading flow.
The story line itself was very interesting and kept me reading, the last quarter of the book was INTENSE.
I would recommend this book for adults, very mature young adults, or people very into sports hockey.

A fantastic, immersive read that is miles different than everything out this year.

I won this book in a YALLWrite giveaway, hesitant to have requested it at first. The minute I began reading it, after adjusting to worldbuilding and being introduced to the language, I was absolutely enthralled. What started as a a beautiful book addressing the negative viewpoints non-Native people have of those who are Native quickly turned into a murder mystery/drug bust that keeps you on the edge of your seat. Every time I was forced to put the book down or take a break, I kept thinking of the book, having it occupy my headspace until I was able to pick it back up again. I finished it in a public place and physically threw my hands up at the hundreds of plot twist that snuck up on me while reading.

I can't even describe this book besides the fact that it's fantastic. It's brilliant, eye-opening, enthralling, and a freaking fantastic read. What a wonderful way to bring in 2021 and definitely one of my most highly recommended reads of the year. Whatever you think this book is going to be about, it will change every opinion you have and make you fall in love with it.

Thank you Netgalley and Macmillian for the Firekeeper's Daughter ARC.
I enjoyed Firekeeper’s Daughter tremendously and highly recommend this novel.

My journey started with the beautiful cover art and flowed excitedly as each page was devoured!

The characters were well written with compelling lives interwoven in this YA realistic fiction novel #OwnVoices. You could follow each character's story and how the connection with each other is well thought out.

The Native American protagonists have a story to tell. I love this female-driven story. It is heartbreaking, funny, interesting, with powerful messaging about community, strength, family, customs, and figuring out one's identity when you are multiracial. I enjoyed learning a little about the Ojibwe teachings and appreciated the authentic Native language featured throughout the novel.

The setting of the novel in Sault Ste. Marie was a beautiful additional character. I am eager to learn more about the location and community.
#FirekeepersDaughter #NetGalley
Content warning: drug use, mention of overdose, murder, grief, sexual assault, racism

Thank you to Netgally for the advance copy on exchange for my honest review.

Recent high school grad and hockey goon Daunis Fontain is coming to terms with the suspicious death of her uncle when she witnesses the murder of her best friend. From there she is asked to investigate a meth ring on Sugar island as a CI.

I have mixed feelings about this book. While I lived Daunis, it is very YA, as in repetitive and we are consubekng told and explained too. Which is frustrating. Also, I feel that there were plot holes around Jamie’s character and the reactions to certain events...some of which just felt thrown in for no apparent reason and which were very disturbing.

I liked learning more about the Ojibwe tribe and culture and language. It was a pretty well paced book. And it is a vital reminder of the ugly truth that this country will not see: the disappearance and murder of Native women and girls.

Trigger warnings: addition, rape, sexual assault, kidnapping...

Final book of 2020! 🎉⁣
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Y’all. I cannot believe how good FIREKEEPER’S DAUGHTER is. It’s a coming of age story, a murder mystery, and a love story, but most importantly, it’s a much needed Native #ownvoices contribution to YA. I learned so much history and culture, but it never became pedantic or sacrificed characterization and plot. I don’t know what else to say besides you absolutely need this when it debuts in March. ⁣
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Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillan for an eARC in exchange for this review. ⁣
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⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Riveting own voices tale about coming of age as an Ojibwe/white teen in Michigan. Daunis Fontaine deals with death, political rights, drug use and even sexual abuse. All the very tense subjects in this book are dealt with deftly and equitably. I appreciate that we can see Daunis' thoughts, it really helps the reader empathize with the character. I also appreciate the bond that Daunis has with the tribal elders, it's nice to see positive adult/teen relationships.

The cover is beautiful! The story is powerful! It's not often that we see Native American stories set in current time. I enjoyed learning about some of the culture and traditions and even a little bit of the language. Daunis is a strong biracial young woman caught between two worlds she deeply loves. The twists and turns kept my son and I engaged and wanting more! Great debut!

An intense thriller, cultural story of Ojibwe teachings, and coming of age. Fantastic YA debut!
I was enthralled by its beautiful cover and the first pages had me hooked into the story. The violence is intense and not expected but the story and its tale of history and present injustices. It's all accurate of the treatment of Indigenous peoples in North America.

Thank you Netgalley and Macmillian for the Firekeeper's Daughter ARC. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Although challenging at times (for me to understand), I appreciated the authentic Native American language and traditions mentioned. The storyline kept me guessing and I found myself reading late at night to find out what would happen to Daunis and the rest of the characters. This is a must read for adolescents as well as adults.

Intrigue and tragedy plague eighteen-year-old Ojibwe Daunis Fontaine. So-engrossed by the immediately-captivating Daunis and her story, the reader may not realize what an education they get along the way, from Ojibwe Tribal politics and traditions, to complicated and cross-cultural family dynamics, to jurisdictional issues, to the historical trauma of Indian boarding schools, to the toll drug addiction takes on communities and individuals, to the complications of boosters involved in sports teams. Daunis is the daughter of then-teenage Ojibwe former hockey great, Levi Firekeeper and Grace Fontaine.

From the first chapter, Daunis tries to balance her existence in two worlds: she is unable to enroll in the tribe of her father because her maternal grandparents kept her father off of her birth certificate--an expression of their prejudice against Native Americans--but deeply-rooted in the practice of her tribal traditions and community. Alternately criticized and celebrated for not being Native enough, Daunis navigates the waters of her community and her family’s concurrent racism and love.

Her Gramma Pearl, on her Firekeeper side, always said that bad things happen in threes. First, her maternal uncle died in April, second, her maternal grandmother had a stroke, and third...nothing could prepare Daunis for what comes next and the turmoil that it unleashes on her person and community.

Boulley deftly places the reader in the community and geography of Sault Ste. Marie, fully fleshing out characters and personalities from Daunis’s intergenerational circle. People are complicated and messy and Boulley does a masterful job of showing the many facets of those in Daunis’s life, from her nieces, to her GrandMary, to her brother, aunt, elders, and mother. Everyone has a story and while Firekeeper’s Daughter is wholly Daunis’s, Boulley shows the reader how completely intertwined our individual stories are.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing an ARC of this book!
I was completely blown away by this book in the BEST way possible. I went into reading it without knowing much about the story, and ended up staying up until 3:30 am to finish it because I couldn’t put it down! Firekeeper’s Daughter is a #OwnVoices YA thriller that immerses the reader into Ojibwe culture and traditions, while calling attention to some of the issues the Indigenous community faces in modern times. Personally, I know that I have a lot more to learn about Indigenous people/culture in the present, as well as the Indigenous history of the land I currently live on. This book did not shy away from addressing difficult topics, so I will not shy away from going beyond what I read in this story to gain a better understanding of Native peoples.
The plot of the story was very engaging, with big reveals placed throughout the book to help the pace of the story flow naturally. I really enjoyed the fact that this was written in a first person POV. As the protagonist, Daunis, put together clues and tried to solve the dangerous mystery affecting her community and beyond, it felt as though the reader was right there with her, to the point where I really couldn’t predict much and the predictions I did make were often way off. This is a story I truly think everyone would enjoy and I can’t wait to start recommending it to people!
Content warning: drug use, mention of overdose, murder, grief, sexual assault, racism

Daunis Fontaine is at a crossroads. She has graduated from high school and must decide if she should attend college closer to home or follow her dreams a little farther away. She is in between relationships and needs to decide if she should pursue the handsome new player on her brother's hockey time. And lastly, and most urgently, she must decide who she can and cannot trust within her community when she is thrust into the midst of a homicide investigation when she witnesses a murder firsthand.

I absolutely loved this book and could have finished it in one sitting. I must admit, it played right to my areas of interest. I am a science educator who loves a good mystery and puzzle. Throughout the book, Daunis sprinkles in her scientific observations from her science and medical training, which became fun easter eggs for me, since I was also familiar with these references. Additionally, I really appreciated how Boulley structured the mystery and it unfolded in an organic way that had me continually on the edge of my seat, wanting to see what happened next.

I have not read a lot of Indigenous literature and, for me, this continued to be incredibly helpful in learning more about the Ojibwe community, along with the language and traditions. These elements of the Anishinaabe language and culture were integral elements of the story an were incorporated in a way that both supported and enriched the plot of the story.

Overall, I was incredibly moved and inspired and look forward to Boulley's next release. I would highly recommend giving this one a read!

The name is deceiving: this is not speculative fiction! The Firekeeper in question is (deceased) Levi Firekeeper, father to Duanis, and a member of the Sugar Island Ojibwe. Duanis is not a member, since her birth certificate doesn't list Levi as her father (and her mother is white), but she is a part of the community. Readers will learn much about the teachings, ceremonies and language via Duanis' story, as well as the hockey-obsession in Sault Ste-Marie that spans both Native and white communities. I loved the immersion into Duanis' life as she offers semaa and prays, participates in the pow wow, honors her Elders and receives teachings.

No, not spoiling any of this for readers - the blurb will give enough away. All I can say is that this is yet another example of an #ownvoices book that provides a new way to look at a long ignored community.

eARC provided by publisher via NetGalley.

This was like nothing I’ve ever read and I loved it. It was refreshingly new and I hope this goes mainstream and is read by everyone. It was well written, eye opening, confronted complex issues everyone should reflect on and understand, and was all around extremely powerful.

Daunis lives in a small community in northern Michigan, right on the border with Canada. Her mother is white and her father was Ojibwe, and as an unenrolled member of the tribe she's spent her whole life moving between those two worlds, never quite being accepted in either one. She was planning to move away for college this year to pursue her dream of becoming a doctor, but after her grandmother suffers a stroke she decides to stay in the area instead. When she witnesses a shooting at a party on the reservation, she's recruited to be a confidential informant for the FBI as they investigate the sudden influx of meth in the area. Daunis's investigation reveals a side to her community that she hadn't seen before and forces her to confront her own family's secrets. But as she gets closer to the truth, she begins to question the consequences of working with the FBI: will this investigation help her people or hurt them more?

Firekeeper's Daughter is a powerful book. It deals with both the drug epidemic and violence against Native women, so the subject matter is very heavy (there is explicit sexual violence in this book). However, Daunis's love of her family and her culture brings some more uplifting moments as well. The book opens with the shooting at the party and then backtracks to cover the events leading up to it. The first act moves very slowly during this flashback section, which may be off-putting to some readers, but the result is that by the time the action picks back up you are very familiar with Daunis's friends, family, and community. For me, this was a plus - I think that Daunis's best friend, Lily, particularly benefited from a longer introduction - but be prepared for a slow-burn of a novel. In between the drug/murder investigation scenes, you get romance, family drama, and hockey games fleshing out the characters and making the setting feel lived-in. It had a solid mystery that kept me engaged, and the rapid pace of the last act more than made up for the slower beginning.

The book also has many long passages in which Daunis explains parts of her culture to the reader. Sometimes it sounds natural, but other times the exposition feels out-of-place in an internal monologue. Certain passages can be a bit of an info dump as a result, but I found that having that background ultimately made me more invested in what was going on in her community and made some of the dramatic scenes toward the end hit much harder. The author didn't shy away from the difficult morality of the situation that Daunis was in, and it felt like an honest exploration of some very complicated topics (addiction, grief, sexual assault, racism) that I think teens will appreciate. I would strongly recommend this book to thriller/mystery fans, but even if those two genres aren't your cup of tea, I think Daunis's personal struggles and growth will make readers invested in her story.

MY REVIEW: 4 Stars ⭐️

There needs to be more Native American authors and books!! We need them in High Fantasy and Young Adult! This one is another crime type book and I would like to see the native people in fantasy and all other rolls. That being said, this was still a wonder debut novel by the author.

The strength of the main character, Daunis, is fantastic! There are a lot of hard and sad things she has to go through. I found the family and side characters great too!

* Thank you to Netgalley and MacMillian for a digital copy of this book?

I am having trouble putting into words how much this book moved me, I am not sure there are words enough. A book about the power of women, traditions and the evils that lurk beneath, this story weaves together indigenous stories with the modern day drug problems as it gives a history lesson on the atrocities against indigenous tribes. The language, in all tongues represented, was powerful and full of respect and honor for traditions and ways of indigenous peoples. I am so excited to get this book for my classroom and to share this gorgeous book with my students

I loved this book and plan to use it in a research study and a presentation to teachers. I'll also be using it in my classroom.

Thanks to NetGalley for providing an ARC of this book.

4.25 out of 5 stars.
This book could have been five stars. There was a lot of teenage angst in this book, which kind of turned me off, particularly regarding teenage relationships and how much they appear to be adult relationships to the teens at the time. I know, I know...this is how being a teenager actually is. But it just...I didn't appreciate it. There were so many relationships it was hard to keep up with them after a while.

This book was excellent, though. Daunis is a Native American teenager living in Michigan with her tribe. She was raised by her single mother who got pregnant as a teenager, was sent away to have Daunis, and when she returned, the child's father was married to someone else and they had just had a child of their own.

That child, Daunis' brother Levi, and Daunis are close. They both play hockey. They have a generalized group of friends.

There's "the new kid," Jamie, who befriends Daunis and Daunis starts to have feelings for, right before he tells her that he works with the FBI and his "Uncle Ron" is actually his partner in a case that is trying to find the source of a bad batch of meth that had a whole group of kids from another reservation sick.

They enlist Daunis, because of her genius, to help them with the case.

There are quite a number of holes in this story. For starters, the beginning seems to build up to Daunis doing experiments with meth to recreate what made the kids at the other reservation sick, but she ends up researching hallucinogenic mushrooms on Sugar Island. There is a lot of talk about The Little People, but we never end up finding out what is actually happening. They are a huge part of the hallucinations and Daunis determines that they were not, in fact, hallucinations, but part of their culture and they were turning up to warn the kids about the bad medicine, but it feels like there was a lot left out of that part of the story.

There was a lot of emotion in this. The turmoil that Daunis experienced being a confidential informant was very believable. There were some devastating incidents that had me about crying, and Daunis' reaction after one of them was just...gut-wrenching and heartbreaking. Defense mechanism. I suppose.

The ending was complete and satisfying.
Excellent read. Highly recommended.