Tears in the Grass

Because I love Canada so much as a place to visit, this book appealed to me from the start. It is set mostly in the prairies whose vast wilderness is evoked so well. The reader moves through three generations of women, meeting the very different characters who make up the family and who work together to find something taken away from Elionor, a feisty 90 year old, more than half a century ago. The book is a tribute to the strength of women. Very enjoyable and highly recommended.

I absolutely loved this book and the POV that it had! I've never read a book like this before and it was definitely interesting!

A lovely meditation on aging, secrets, relationships between mothers and daughters, and life as a Native Canadian from the late 19th through the first six decades of the 20th centuries.

Feisty, independent artist Elinor is a 90-something Saskatchewan Cree who wants to find the daughter she bore as a result of rape at the white school she was forced to attend in her early teens. She's never told her family of the child, removed against her wishes within an hour or two of the birth. She doesn't know whether the child was given to someone or killed, but she feels it is still alive. She enlists the help of her daughter Louise, a lawyer long-alienated from her tribe and heritage and with her own terrible lifelong secret, and Louise's daughter Alice, a young teacher and closeted lesbian who is struggling with whether she will ever be able to share her life with her family. As Louise and Alice struggle to find a way to identify the now elderly child, Elinor takes things into her own hands, desperate to make this connection before her death, which she feels is closing in on her.

The voices are distinctive, even including a long-stuffed museum bison Elinor is working on drawing. At times Louise's and Alice's back stories pull the reader reluctantly from the drama of whether Elinor will get her dying wish, so the story is perhaps a little long, but it's still a wonderful read with memorable characters and settings. Highly recommended.

This richly beautiful book tells the multigenerational story of three women, Elinor, her daughter Louise, and her granddaughter Alice. Set in the late 1960s in rural Saskatchewan Province, Tears in the Grass at its core is a story of secrets and searching, with both internal and external searches of great depth. It also is a story of relationships, abuse, disappointments, and great joy, all set within the context of the clash and meshing of First Americans and "whites. This novel could have slipped easily into trite "women's fiction" had it not been for Archer's masterful storytelling and her gorgeous language. Brava!