Through her culturally conscious, thriller-meets-Young-Adult-romance, The Firekeepers Daughter, Angeline Boulley flits between a multitude of themes including racial identity and assault through the course of her eye-opening, yet at times predictable, debut novel.

Written from the perspective of ‘Daunis’, an eighteen-year-old mixed-race protagonist, the author draws from her own experiences as someone who has never “fit in” to either of the cultures her parents are from, presenting Daunis as an amalgamation of her own thoughts and perspectives on the world, rooting her character amidst the turmoil of the modern world.

Daunis takes the form of a strong female lead and is introduced to us by her aspiration to study medicine, which is thwarted by a recent familial calamity that results in her having to give up these dreams for the time being and direct her focus onto her family. However, upon a sudden influx of deaths and an exponential increase in substance abuse in her community, Daunis finds herself undercover for the FBI investigating this rapid change that is slowly devouring away at her life as she knows it, something that permanently alters her understanding of the world around her.

Even before the main plot of the novel begins, Daunis’ character is established as someone having endured heavy volumes of trauma, dealing with the off-page death of her father, and the recent death of the mysterious “Uncle David,” who is an unknown character whose qualities she begins to emulate as the storyline progresses. As for her racial background, an aspect of her character that plays a key role in the advancement of the novel, Daunis is a biracial eighteen-year-old with an Italian/French single mother and a now deceased Chippewa father from the North American Indian Ojibwe tribe. Daunis has always been caught in a constant struggle for identity as she moves between these two worlds, never really feeling as though she belongs to either. Boulley reflects her own conflicting sense of self onto Daunis’s character, describing her uncertainty at being a “light-skinned Obijwe woman,” the color of her skin distinguishing her from those who are fully part of Native American communities, and her indigenous roots separating her from the more ‘white’ side of society. When a series of murders begin to take place in her hometown, she has no choice but to merge these two worlds in order to help track down the perpetrator, integrating her understanding of modern and traditional science to make sense of a drug that, just like her, doesn’t fit into the confines of either world.

Set in Sault Ste. Marie and the nearby Ojibwe reservation, an area of land held and governed by a federally recognized Native American tribal nation, Boulley allots extended sections of the novel to develop the settings and give the readers an accurate and riveting insight into Native American communities and culture. Through her novel, she highlights these otherwise underrepresented communities in contemporary literature. Personally, this was one of the first times I had read an entire novel that revolved solely around Native American culture and the complete dissection of its system, making it equally informative and important.

Boulley establishes the tone of the novel from the very beginning, which is a confused mix of Daunis’s naive and somewhat childish dialogue, and darker themes that have a great deal of gravity and weight to them. It’s safe to say she executes the latter far better than the former, creating a strong sense of cultural identity and importance that permeates throughout the story. The multitude of themes that the author was able to explore was significant and note-worthy, but at times it did feel as though she was doing too much. Since Boulley touches upon just about everything that constitutes the human experience - from themes of identity, belief systems, and family, to violence, sexual assault and racism - at times this novel feels more like a commentary on social systems and early adulthood than the mystery-thriller it's advertised to be. While these were all very important themes, and the author was able to effectively integrate them into the storyline, it was their correlation to Daunis’s own adolescent and carefree perspective that resulted in a confused and rather disconnected tone. But because of these varied tones, the understandably traumatic instances of abuse and murder that Daunis confronts simply came across as a subplot or dramatic device, which are only used when needed, and conveniently disappear when not.

I think the author definitely fell short when it came to her characters. Not only were there too many to keep track of but the ones that she highlighted — Daunis and Jamie for instance — weren’t given the depth they deserved. This left us with an overdone, “quirky,” and unlikable protagonist and her mysterious love interest, whose backstory is presented in a manner such as to make it seem as though he’s more than just a one-dimensional side character. Nevertheless, the need for fully fleshed-out, likable characters faded in the light of the novel as a whole and its presentation of society and justice. The characters seemed to be nothing but tools to execute the plot and keep the reader hooked. In fact, it was the background characters - such as Daunis’s Auntie Teddie, her Uncle David, her friends Lily and Travis, and her mother - whose stories I was more interested in. I was looking forward to reading the author’s own insights into their backstories, but this was something she understandably did not have the time or space to elucidate upon.

As for the plot of the novel, I have to admit it was not as much of a thriller as I had hoped it would be, and only truly picked up pace towards the last 200 pages. This made the first half a pain to get through when it came to pacing and plotline. While the overall outline for the novel as a whole was rather engaging and the descriptions and long pieces of prose were well written, the plot did feel quite discrepant and seemed to lag on multiple ends.

Overall, this book is, at its very core, a commentary on the Native American experience, offering its reader a clear and well-thought-out insight into exactly what it feels to be on the receiving end of the violence and racial prejudice that dominates American society. Boulley extrapolates upon the emotion and turmoil she felt as a young woman of mixed ethnicity, using Daunis’s character to mirror her own journey towards the healing of both herself and her understanding of the world. Additionally, although it may not seem so on the surface, the experiences Daunis is shown to undergo and the conflict she is forced to come to face with could easily be generalized to, and represent, the events so many indigenous peoples have had to confront. Boulley picks up this core battle between culture and modernity and places it in a murder mystery/coming-of-age story, vividly depicting her own coming-to-terms with her dual cultural identity, instilling themes of healing and rebirth.

All in all, I enjoyed reading the book, although not through the lens of the ‘murder-mystery’ it was advertised as, but rather as a piece of cultural fiction that expanded my worldview and gave me a fresh and authentic take on Native American society. I’d give the novel 3 and a half stars, purely because of how much I learnt about racial prejudice and its effect on identity and self. However, I would not recommend this to readers actively seeking out a fast-paced thriller, it will do nothing but leave them, partially as it left me, disappointed.