"To find a missing young woman, the new tribal marshal must also find herself."
Mask of the Deer Women drew me in by the cover and had me captivated from the first page. The author wrote this well and I was turning pages until the very end. All of the characters in this were great. This one kept me guessing until the end and it will keep you on the edge of your seat. Overall, this was one that I highly enjoyed and would recommend to any reader who likes mystery or thriller books. Thank you to NetGalley and Berkley Publishing Group for this read in exchange of my honest review of Mask of the Deer Woman by Laurie L. Dove.

I enjoyed the setting and the mystery of the missing girl. However, Carrie Starr was a hard person to like when we first met her. She didn't want to come back to the reservation, and due to her past she really didn't want to investigate Chenoa's disappearance and kind of was going through the motions. I did like her more as the story progressed, but I never really connected with her.
I really enjoyed the story of the Deer Woman and how it constantly popped up throughout the story. Also, the ending was really good and once we reached a certain point I was thoroughly sucked in by what was going on.

After her daughter's death, ex-detective Carrie Starr, is appointed the new tribal Marshall on the reservation where her father grew up. But she doesn't get the welcome she thought she would. To be fair, this job is her last shot and on the first day she's charged with finding college student, Chenoa Cloud. No one is making this easy for her and there are other factors at play. And other missing women. Carrie is also being haunted by the legend of Deer Woman. But is Deer Woman out for revenge or is she helping Carrie?
Hopefully, this is the start of a series. Carrie Starr had a lot of growth throughout this novel. I would love to see her doing great things on the reservation.

*Special thanks to NetGalley and Berkley for this digital e-arc.*

I wanted to like this book more, but it didn't resonate in the way I'd hoped. The number of missing women from reservations should be more of a national concern, and I'm glad to see the problem addressed in fiction.

I went into this book with high hopes based on the synopsis, but it just didn’t quite live up to them.

One of the biggest issues for me was the MC Starr. She was so unlikable for most of the book, and her attitude drove me crazy. I could sort of understand her jaded view based on what had happened in her life, but the constant dismissal of evidence and her self-destructive behaviors while working the case were too much for me. If anything, I’d have thought her life experiences would have made her work harder. Also, the mystery of how certain things are tied together was only a mystery to Starr, so her realization at the end of the book didn’t quite hit with as much force, as the reader is already aware of these things.

That said, there were things I liked about this book. The feelings Starr had as a half-Indigenous woman were interesting, especially being back on her father’s reservation and being around this community; I think this could’ve even been explored more. I also wasn’t expecting the twist at the very end, and was honestly surprised by how things wrapped up (albeit a little abruptly).

I don’t think this was a book for me, but I can definitely see why other people may love it.

Thank you NetGalley!

The pacing for this book was a little slow at the beginning but became a very good read. I love reading about different versions about Deer Lady/Woman and this book was so solid. I can't wait to read more from Laurie L. Dove.

I received a gifted galley of MASK OF THE DEER WOMAN by Laurie L. Dove for an honest review. Thank you to PRH Audio, Berkley Publishing Group, and Netgalley for the opportunity to read and review!

MASK OF THE DEER WOMAN follows Carrie Starr. Carrie was raised separate from the reservation where her lineage has roots. When she loses her daughter and leaves her Chicago detective job behind, she is drawn back to the place her father never really talked about. Many young women have gone missing over the years, with college student Chenoa Cloud being the latest. Even as the case stirs up past memories of her daughter, Carrie is determined to get answers and to find the missing girl. As she begins to see a woman with deer antlers, a figure from her father’s stories, she must wonder what is real and whether this can help her find Chenoa.

It took me a while to get settled into this story, but I did wind up enjoying it in the end. The slow to engage absolutely could have been more of a me thing than a book thing. There are a lot of moving parts to this story (myth and truth, substance abuse, grief, politics, and more) and I think the author did well at laying them all out, but it was quite a bit to get set in my mind before I could fully feel enmeshed in the story.

I did find the mystery element and the blend with Carrie’s own search for her roots and identity to make a good story. The grief that she’s feeling in the wake of her daughter’s death also had me really feeling for her even as she made some choices that made me want to shake her. I really appreciated learning a bit about the author’s links to this story in the author notes as she was adopted into a non-Indigenous family and went searching for her own roots much like the main character.

The Mask of the Deer Woman is so atmospheric, it completely transported me to Oklahoma and to the rez. The characters were brought to life, so vivid, so real.

The MC, Marshall Carrie Starr, was recently sent to the rez to represent the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Carrie has a lot of demons she's personally battling while trying to protect the rez, most specifically to get to the bottom of numerous missing women.

The story is truly heartbreaking and not the first I have read to tackle the tragedy of missing Native American women. It really paints a sad picture of the inequities experienced and the lack of consideration and protection for the Indigenous community. I'm not sure what the solution is, but education is a good first step. The Mask of the Deer Woman helps spread the information, and the more people who are aware, the greater chance of making a difference. I enjoyed both the author's note and acknowledgements, heartwarming and transparent.

It's a solid debut and I am looking forward to more by Laurie Dove.

I wanted so badly to like this book. The premise is full of the interesting contradictions that can force a reader out of complacent distance into hard and critical thinking: having, for example, its protagonist Carrie Starr be a tribal marshal in a world where it is the tribal police’s indifference, among other systemic failures, that have produced the pandemic of violence against many Native women and girls is a premise that directly implicates its heroine in the system she would theoretically be working against. She’s a structural anti-heroine of sorts. There’s so much room to dig in there! That she’s a half-Native, half-white character raised away from the reservation and with many explicit biases against the native community to which she returns, and yet also with a daughter who suffered a very similar fate to so many of these Native women and girls—also incredibly interesting! It embeds into the surface conflict an embodied question of community belonging, along with very real questions of the power dynamics of being both outsider and insider / what it means to ethically be a part of a community within the surface conflict.

Unfortunately, the novel only delivers for those willing to suffer the frustration of the first 60-odd pages (and I almost didn’t). Along the way, it includes all sorts of odd narrative choices that read like the novel kneecapping itself from achieving its full potential.

There is a version of Mask of the Deer Woman that could have done justice to Starr’s jaded and imperfect heroism from the start. A more skillful writer could, for example, have rendered the internal back-and-forth that characterizes the best noir heroes: the harsh tug between a long-buried sense of justice, a sense of helplessness to act on that sense of justice in relation to deep personal loss, the necessary selfishness of someone who grew up without much and thus prioritizes survival above all else, and the attempt to drown an all-encompassing grief in alcohol. Transposed into Starr’s specific experiences as a half-Native, half-white woman who came from poverty, Dove could have delivered an intensely interesting twist on noir tropes, ones that actively consider the noir hero-detective-cop’s complicity in perpetuating violence.

The version of Starr Dove presents us in early chapters carries little of that depth, to the point that you wonder if Dove wanted so badly to showcase her character’s flaws that she abandoned character consistency. When meeting with the furious mother of Chenoa Cloud, a vanished Native American girl, Starr has the gall to dismiss the case as possibly drug-related, or a fit of post-teenage rebellion. She then invokes the epidemic of murdered or vanished Indigenous women throughout North America and the tragic death of her own daughter (one of those very women) in the same breath.

On top of being cartoonishly abhorrent (I had to set the book down for an entire day after reading this section, I was so angry), that Starr recognizes the links between her own lost daughter and the endemic violence against Native women and girls to whom she’s ostensibly been hired to bring to justice yet cannot even muster the compassion to humor another terrified mother in the same situation she was once in makes very little sense. That inconsistency worsens when you consider Starr’s response as a detective. Her insistence that the vanished girl might just have skipped town without telling anyone or gotten involved with drugs ignores the glaringly obvious: that it is in those very moments where young women are often most vulnerable to harm.

I can see why Dove has Starr react this way: Starr’s bungling illustrates the minor violence the police commit via indifference (and in some cases, via direct violence). But how is it possible that Starr—who demonstrates sufficient familiarity with the vanishing and murder of Native women and remains haunted by the way her own daughter died—would make such assumptions in the first place? That we’re dwelling on this question instead of on the structural violence and complicity Dove is trying to illustrate is a failure not of imagination but writerly execution, one that costs Dove the reader’s immersion right as she’s trying to set up some of the key social dynamics of the novel.

This overindexing on ‘hateability’ extends to the novel’s villains too. Every villain in this story is little more than a cartoon character—which can be great fun in a mystery novel laden with red herrings but falls flat when you consider the social and environmental concerns Dove is trying to establish through those villains. Structurally, Mask of the Deer Woman recognizes and demonstrates the ways in which environmental violence via resource extraction works through seemingly mundane, bureaucratic systems—permits and grants, political lobbying, public hearings, etc.

If Dove had made this point successfully, Mask of the Deer Woman would be the rare work in fiction that helps illustrate how all Americans are implicated in the sale of our own future through our disenfranchisement from, or ignorance of, these systems. Tragically, Dove undermines herself through the outlandish evil projected onto the faces of the novel’s extractive interests. The oil/gas developer Holder—one of many cartoonishly evil capitalists—references the land he seeks to grab as a “wasteland” and the planned fracking operation as “a copper mine in the Congo: nothing but profit, assuming you could reach a deal with the natives.” Dove introduces us to crooked small-town mayor Helen with a similar lack of subtlety: “embezzlement was such a dirty word,” Helen says to herself, followed by “she might be willing to consider the statehouse. If the kickbacks were right.” As if Dove doesn’t trust her readers to figure out who the villains of the story are without massive signs that read “Evil Guy Here.” The consequence is that her conflict could still be dismissed as the work of bad actors rather than the work of systems.

What saved this book from an untimely abandonment, I think, is the mythology of Deer Woman and the way it comes to shape Starr’s consciousness and animate her slow change in orientation towards community. Right at the point where I was considering giving up, Deer Woman’s mythology shone through with a startling intensity. In one retelling, Junior, a former friend of Starr’s dad recounts an encounter with the vengeful, justice-bearing being in terms that made me snap to attention. It’s probably what stopped me from giving up completely.

‘“Deer Woman? I saw her once [...] It had been hard going for months. So, when we came upon the deer, my old man lined up the shot while it stood there like a statue. I mean, it just stood there, broadside like a target, waiting, nose lifted, nostrils flaring like it had picked up our scent. But instead of running, it stayed.”
[...]
“It was a heart shot,” he said. “Dropped the buck dead. We knew we’d have to work fast to field dress him, and packing him out would be a long, slow walk in the dark. But I didn’t care. I wanted my dad to take the head; I’d seen an antlered skull mount in a hunting magazine, and I’d always thought about it, how cool it would be to have a bare skull and antlers on the wall. And this deer had a trophy rack, probably fourteen points. Biggest one I’d ever seen. But when my old man turned the deer over to gut it— [...] And when he cut it open? Female. It was a doe, not a buck. [...] I heard later that it happens sometimes, that maybe one in one thousand female deer grow antlers. And female caribou have antlers, but not our deer, not what we have here. These deer aren’t supposed to have them. [...] And she had a fawn. Inside [...] Fully developed, ready for birth, like it could kick its way clean out of her. It wasn’t just that this buck—what we’d thought was a buck—had turned out to be a doe with antlers. It was that she had a fawn to care for, and it was still alive, inside her. What were we supposed to do? It wouldn’t have lived much longer. So I sat there, on my knees, watching it move inside the caul while my old man skinned and parted the doe. Your dad didn’t want any part of it, so I cut through the caul and sawed clear through the fawn’s throat.”
[...] “Thing is,” he said, turning back to look her in the eyes, “anything . . . anyone . . . I’ve loved has been taken from me. Ever since that day. Every single time. It’s a curse.”
“Who’s taken them from you?”
“Deer Woman,” he said.

By the time we reach this moment, however, its power has already been diminished by the clumsy way in which Deer Woman was inserted into the novel before it. In a reservation full of characters who would presumably have diverse and multifaceted relationships to their cultural myths—maybe know more stories than just that of Deer Woman, even—all seem to know to cite Deer Woman on the writer’s cue, when relevant to the plot or exposition. Sometimes this need to insert Deer Woman early seems to have led the novel to rely on character archetypes: Most egregiously, the first complete retelling of Deer Woman’s story in the novel’s opening chapters comes from an archetypal elder-figure who speaks in riddles and remains detached from reality, as if lifted from a bad Western’s imitation of Native American spirituality. Little things like these left the novel’s world feeling claustrophobic at moments when it seems poised to expand into more interesting engagements with its own subject matter.

Mask of the Deer Woman isn’t a bad book. In many respects, it’s a very good mystery, and I appreciated the thoughtfulness of its ending (no spoilers, but Starr kind of sees redemption without being resolved into a full-blown hero, which I very much appreciated). The problem is you have to wade through ten chapters of rage reading before you can get to the good parts, which come through inconsistently even when they do arrive. Mainly I just wish this had been a different novel than it turned out to be, and that’s the worst feeling to leave your readers with. But so it goes.

Thanks to Netgalley and to Berkley for the chance to read this book in advance.

Laurie L. Dove, author of “Mask of the Deer Woman,” channels her experience as an Indigenous child adopted by white parents into a haunting, atmospheric mystery that weaves folklore with real-world tragedy.

Inspired by her own search for identity and the crisis of missing Indigenous women, the novel finds Carrie Starr, a grief-stricken ex-detective, returning to her father’s reservation as a tribal marshal tasked with investigating the disappearance of a college student. As she delves deeper, Starr faces a tangled web of missing Indigenous women, political tensions and her own demons. Haunted by visions of the mythical Deer Woman, she must confront whether this spirit is a guide or a reckoning.

Dove skillfully blends suspense with cultural depth, highlighting urgent social issues while delivering a gripping mystery. The vivid depiction of life on the reservation, combined with stark realities and eerie folklore, creates a captivating, layered narrative. With twists, complex characters and emotional weight, “Mask of the Deer Woman” is a powerful read for fans of dark, riveting reads and those seeking stories rooted in justice and resilience.

When Indigenous women disappeared, they disappeared twice.

Carrie Starr, the new tribal marshal, didn’t grow up on the reservation. An ex-Chicago detective, she’s deeply grieving the loss of her daughter. While her father was raised there, Starr never learned much about reservation life. Now, she’s trying to help a desperate mother find her missing daughter, Chernoa Cloud.

Chenoa isn’t the only young Native American woman who’s gone missing, but sadly, few are concerned. As the tribe’s only law enforcement, Starr works tirelessly to find little evidence to support her search for Chenoa.

As Starr delves deeper, she encounters some intriguing lore. The Mask of the Deer Woman might be more than just a legend. She must connect the dots to see if it’s connected to Chenoa’s disappearance. Time is running out, but Starr is determined to bring justice for the young women who’ve already lost their lives.

Laurie L. Dove’s debut novel is a powerful and impactful story. Indigenous people on reservations often face immense challenges. This fictional story about a missing young woman could be biographical, reflecting the sad state of affairs.

I was drawn into Starr’s story, especially her tragic loss of her daughter. This fuels her determination to find Chenoa. The legend she encounters adds a captivating and heartbreaking layer to this novel.

Many thanks to Berkley and to NetGalley for this ARC for review. This is my honest opinion.

I read this fresh off of Murder on the Red River, by Marcie R. Rendon, which served to drive the point home that the more things change, the more things stay the same. Though Rendon’s book is set in 1970, and this book in the present, both serve to highlight the ways in which tribal communities continue to be disadvantaged, and how when indigenous people go missing and/or are murdered, especially women, few notice and fewer care.

When taking all of that into account, and more, I found it difficult to not feel for and root for this book’s main character. Starr is a prickly, devil-may-care, walking open wound of a woman who has come to the land of her father to be a tribal marshal, hoping for a fresh start after her daughter’s death in Chicago. She finds herself ill-equipped, both physically and mentally, to deal with the cold cases of missing and murdered women she has been assigned to solve as part of her marshal duties, let alone the murder of one young woman and the disappearance of another in her first week on the job. All of her trauma understandably comes to the fore, and as a result, she behaves in abrasive and cavalier ways initially, especially to the vanished woman’s mother, while also contending with the possible existence of a supposedly mythical figure called Deer Woman, who avenges women in need. And everything is made more difficult by the fact that she does not feel she belongs among her father’s people.

All of this is way too much for any one person to take on, and Starr doesn’t exactly handle it gracefully, but she does handle it in a way that both feels authentically hers and shows character growth. I liked seeing that while she obviously doesn’t quite get to a place where she can move forward by the end of the story, because hers is a highly complicated grief, she is at least trying to take a step or two in the right direction. In addition, her grief, addictions, self-doubt, rage, and unquenchable thirst for justice are rendered in such raw prose that Starr becomes viscerally real.

And the mystery itself. I always love watching the investigator fit all the disparate puzzle pieces together to solve the case, and in this book, these pieces are very disparate. And with all the side characters’ POVs, the story kept me guessing who would have both motive and opportunity, along with whether or not any of the cases are connected. And Deer Woman’s role in all of this—perfection. In the end, I wonder if I should have figured out at least part of it beforehand; I will say I was quite surprised by how everything came together towards the story’s conclusion.

Overall, this was an excellent book, expertly weaving the very serious problem of missing and murdered indigenous women with themes of complicated grief, what it means to belong in a community, the various means of seeking justice, and potent female rage. If this turns into a series, count me in.

Indigenous women “go missing” at an alarming rate in this country. The tribal police, local police, state, and federal authorities may not have pursued these cases of missing women, sometimes because of lack of resources, faulty assumptions, lack of concern or no media pressure. The author seeks to explore this dynamic in the context of an ex-Chicago police officer, Carrie Starr. This main character is now a tribal marshal under the BIA on a reservation in Oklahoma. She has an actual familial connection to the people there through her deceased father but is unaware of his life on the res or its people. What she does know is that she has a burden of her own daughter’s tragic death and a desire to return to her former life which was derailed in a difficult investigation.

Using myth, memory, geography, and mystery the author explores the life on the res. When a young woman goes missing, Carrie must figure out who may be responsible, tamp down her own PTSD, learn about her own heritage, and how to work with the grieving. There just may be a chance to save herself as well as a missing girl.

The book begins slowly with detailed descriptions of the land and the tribal members Carrie encounters. The story picks up steam as the reader becomes immersed in false leads, mythic encounters and a timeline that keeps ticking. For a debut novel, this was a great start for a new author. Recommended. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing this title.

Laurie Dove’s debut novel, Mask of the Deer Woman, is a mystery centering on the many missing and murdered indigenous women who have vanished throughout the southwest and beyond. There have been several books on this topic, recently William Kent Krueger’s Spirit Crossing and Vanessa Lillie’s Blood Sisters, as well as a searing television show, True Detective: Night Country. Dove frames her story with a strong and troubled female character. Carrie Starr, an ex-Chicago cop, has made her way to her long ago childhood home, Oklahoma, where she has ties to the rez and is the newly appointed Federal Marshal for the BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs).

Working through a miasma of grief – Carrie has lost her own daughter – as well as working through her childhood memories and connections, Starr is hardly an efficient officer when she arrives at what is probably her last chance job. She’s unfocused, drinking, and smoking weed. When she arrives, she’s almost immediately approached by a mother whose daughter has joined the ranks of the missing, and who has been dismissed. Her daughter, Chenoa, was a promising grad student who may have discovered an endangered beetle on lands slated for development and fracking.

There are many other missing girls and Starr eventually begins to search through the file boxes that line her office, discovering old cases and in some of them, a connection. This is what I would call an emotional thriller (much like Krueger’s and Lillie’s books). Because the framing device is a grieving woman who must power through her grief to get to the job at hand, it tilts the story a bit. While as a reader you’re pretty sure she’s going to right herself, writer Dove still manages to make this a bit of a question.

The mystery portion of the novel is part political corruption, part ticking clock thriller, and the discovery of how the two threads might be related is the story of the novel. Meanwhile, Dove effectively paints a picture of the pain of those left behind, as well as the parent’s frustration in getting law enforcement to take them seriously. Chenoa’s mother is a true force of nature, as is her ancient grandmother – swathed in blankets and making pronouncements from her chair – and little by little, Carrie again learns to listen.

She’s also guided by the “Deer Woman,” a spirit that appears with hooves and antlers and who seems to be leading Carrie when she most needs a guide. The Deer Woman seems to be protective of the missing women, and malevolent toward whatever forces made them disappear. As Carrie’s fog of grief begins to clear she allows herself to think she can at least save this one girl, even though the body of another girl has turned up in the course of her investigation.

I loved the setting and the characters in this novel and I thought Carrie’s journey through grief was both provocative and moving. I was slightly disappointed in the resolution which in one way was a huge twist but in another was pretty conventional. However, the writing and characters would bring me back for another investigation with Carrie Starr.

I have only learned what the Deer Woman was just recently, and when I saw that this book was taking the myth and centering it around missing Indigenous women, I put this on my to-read right then and there.

Sadly, this book did not live to that hype.

The pacing is slower than a snail's, and it's due to there being POVs from multiple side characters and Starr's ability to properly function as a good detective. I believe the other POVs were provided in order to give more depth to the mystery, but it felt disjointed, clunky, and it ruined the reveal of the villain because it made it so obvious. Plus, Starr could have found a lot of this stuff out on her own if she was more abrasive and focused, but due to her alcoholism, smoking, grief, and self-hatred of her mixed Native identity, she's not giving the proper attention to the case until the last third or so of the book. It also doesn't help that the other side characters keep telling her that her detective skills suck. Granted, they don't know what she's going through, but I have to agree that she was not the right person for this job.

The Deer Woman didn't play a huge role, either. She kept haunting Starr both in a literal and metaphorical sense. The story did give us cool lore about her that connected to the larger theme of the missing Indigenous women, but I feel like she could have been more of a physical presence, like the righteous monster she is and represents.

One thing I did give this book was the attention Dove gave to the issues surrounding missing Indigenous women in the narrative. Showing a perspective from a Native woman who was a cop provided some interesting takes, too, though I wish it went further in depth than what was shown.

All in all, this story had so much good potential, but it was mostly lost due to the lack of focus. I do hope Dove's writing improves, but I dunno if I'll read whatever she may come out with next.

» READ IF YOU «
👤 love a complex, flawed protagonist
🔍 enjoy suspenseful mysteries with depth
🦌 kinda love the concept of a vigilante who preys on men

» SYNOPSIS «
After the murder of her daughter, detective Carrie Starr finds herself on her father’s reservation as the new tribal marshal. Tasked with investigating the disappearances of young Indigenous women, including the recent disappearance of college student Chenoa, Starr confronts her own grief while navigating a community rife with secrets. Haunted by visions of the Deer Woman—a figure from her father’s stories—Starr must decipher whether this spirit is a guide or a harbinger of vengeance as she delves deeper into the mysteries surrounding her.

» REVIEW «
This story was a compelling blend of mystery and character study that kept me engaged from start to finish. Starr is richly developed — a woman grappling with personal demons, while striving to bring justice to her new community. The inclusion of Indigenous folklore, particularly — MY QUEEN — Deer Woman, added some deliciously dark paranormal vibes to the story.

I am hopeful for a Carrie Starr continuation, because I really enjoyed her growth and there’s plenty more to explore in the rest of the characters! Junior, my man! Overall, it’s a thought-provoking read that sheds light on important issues within Indigenous communities.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Carrie just moved from Chicago to northern Oklahoma for a new job as a tribal marshal for a reservation. She expects to be researching old cases of missing women from the reservation but immediately gets involved in a new case with a missing college woman named Chenoa. When talking to the Chenoa's family, she hears a legend about the deer woman who takes vengeance on men who don't treat women well. Carrie is at first an unlikeable character, she is constantly, drinking even on the job, and doesn't take the college girl's disappearance seriously, thinking she's off somewhere with a friend. Also the story hints as to why she left Chicago and how something bad happened to her daughter. I liked that the story show the struggles that affect people who live on reservations, the lack of good paying jobs and the poverty they often experience. The setting of a small reservation near the Kansas/Oklahoma border is unique. I wish Carrie's reasons for taking the job in Oklahoma were explained earlier in the story, it would have made the reader more sympathetic to her questionable choices.

"Mask of the Deer Woman" is Laurie L. Dove's debut novel. I haven't
stopped thinking about it since I read it.

Struggling after her daughter's death, Carrie Starr (our protagonist)moves from Chicago to the reservation where her father grew up. There, she is hired as tribal marshal while she tries to heal from her past. When a college girl goes missing from the reservation, Starr's investigation reveals a larger and more complicated mystery than expected.

Dove's use of the story of Deer Woman to confront the issue of missing and murdered indigenous women is masterful. Her background in creative writing, social justice, and journalism shows in this novel. While a fictional story, "Mask of the Deer Woman" is rooted in very real and complex issues that indigenous communities are dealing with.

This book is more than just a thriller. It tells the story of an indigenous woman trying to solve the cases of missing indigenous women that have been ignored by local law enforcement while struggling with grief and her sense of self.

DNF. I like the premise, but the narrative felt very unfocused, because of the myriad secondary POVs (3 in six chapters), and the main one wasn’t that engrossing to begin with.

Mask of the Deer Woman by Laurie L. Dove illuminates the pressing issue of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women crisis, weaving a captivating mystery into a poignant exploration of grief, identity, and reconnection.