Acclaimed New York Times best seller Angeline Boulley has been blending suspense and the fast-paced action of a thriller since her first novel, Firekeeper’s Daughter, to tell the stories of Native American teenage girls.
Now, Boulley is releasing her latest book in her series, Sisters in the Wind, to build on her earlier work by diving deeper into Lucy Smith, a character from her other books, this time focusing on the foster care system.
Boulley's books center on Native teen girls solving mysteries in northern Michigan. Boulley is a member of the Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians and says she enjoys highlighting the Ojibwe community through the perspective of women.
The latest book is about a girl, Lucy, who was lost to her extended family for years. During that time, she has been kept in the dark about her mother’s Native identity. But that’s just one of many shattering mysteries Lucy will unravel, as she works her way through the foster care system — with help from the protagonist of the Firekeeper’s Daughter, Daunis Fontaine.
Stateside’s April Baer sat down with Boulley to talk about the new book.
April Baer: It’s been about four years since your last book came out. Your first novel, Firekeeper’s Daughter, was about a girl going undercover to investigate a drug ring in her community. And the second, Warrior Girl Unearthed, returns to Sugar Island to explore new mysteries and stories of Indigenous women in northern Michigan. Now your third book actually goes back and fills in some history between the two previous stories that we missed.
Were you hearing a lot from readers that they needed the backstory on what had happened in the elapsed years?
I knew there would be a lot of curiosity. I plotted book two, Warrior Girl Unearthed, knowing that there were going to be a lot of questions. And so I did plan on a third book answering some of those questions. But also like my other books, you can read it out of order. They're meant to stand on their own.
In Sisters in the Wind, the story circles around Lucy, who's a teen in foster care after her father's death leaves her in the custody of a very unscrupulous stepmother. And Lucy's the kind of girl who's got log-sized chips on her shoulders. How did she come to you?
She came to me just out of desperation at the eleventh hour. I needed to submit a couple of paragraphs for a prospective book three and book four. And I always knew what book four would be about, but book three? I was trying to work out how I knew it needed to involve the element of air, wind. And I knew that I wanted to look at the foster care system.
Lucy doesn’t have a connection with the Native American community at all because her dad, who is white, has basically scrubbed aspects of Lucy’s mother’s life out of Lucy’s life. She has had a lot of hard knocks, like a lot of kids in the foster system. And it's hardened her and her approach to her own misfortune. As the narrator of this story, she is so concise to the point of being really brusque.
Not everybody does the same thing when life throws terrible, terrible curves at them. But I just wondered how Lucy was informed by people you've known or things you've seen happen. Angeline, could you talk about how you've seen young people react to traumatic milestones?
One of the responses to childhood trauma is to shut down or compartmentalize. We see that in trauma survivors, that ability to endure something horrible and yet show up at school the next day. Especially if school is a safe place to just be bubbly and complete all assignments and all that. Lily’s father compartmentalized her mother and just completely never talked about her, and I took that as Lucy's cue of, “we don't have to talk about unpleasant things.” That's really what forms the way that she reacts to things.
Were there stories of foster care that influenced what you wanted to show readers with this book?
Yes, there was the academic research that I did, which was reading the entire Senate subcommittee reports from 1974 that helped form the basis of the Indian Child Welfare Act. But I think more vital was the interviews that I did with friends and colleagues and people that I've met who either have been foster children themselves or foster parents and court personnel. It's those personal interviews that I think really inform the story.
One of the hallmarks of your work is showing and talking about traumatic things without robbing your characters of their agency and their dignity. Is there a short version of your method in figuring out how you're going to write about it?
I always try to approach it from a good place, a good heart. Nothing salacious or gratuitous. And writing about unpleasant truths, but not having that be the entirety of the experience and showing resilience in how a character copes. That informs my whole life philosophy, too. We didn't just inherit generational trauma from our ancestors. We also inherited their strength and resilience, their humor, their love, their need for connection. And that's vital to survival.
In the books, there's a pretty huge generational divide between people who were old enough to be products of the boarding school system and had their culture ripped out of them by violent force. And some younger characters who have grown up in more modern times where they were encouraged to learn their language, they were encouraged to understand tradition and understand their relationship to elders. What was your experience? I'm guessing your parents must have been old enough to have experienced boarding schools.
My dad did not get taken for boarding school and the reason is my grandmother, his mother, who didn't get taken because she had two cousin-sisters that were taken. So my dad’s great-grandmother, who only spoke Ojibwe, hired a white lawyer to write a letter to the boarding school saying: “I gave you these girls to educate. I didn’t give them to you for their whole lives.” So then the school sent them back and one came back with a broken leg. The school told her they didn’t want the girls back because “they were bad girls.”
Because of what had happened to these relatives, they really fought to keep my grandmother out of the boarding schools. So when they came to take my dad to the schools my grandmother was like “absolutely not.” Every Indigenous family has a story about who got taken and then the lucky ones that didn’t, and the ones that never made it home.
We've talked to you about your writing over the years. Were there storytellers in your life when you were growing up who showed you what was possible by communicating through story?
My dad is a fire keeper. So while he's sitting all night at the fire he's telling stories and each time I sit with him, I hear new things and learn more about my dad and my community. So he definitely is that primary story teller in my family.
I just so enjoy seeing the storytellers in my family and their own particular way that they do it.
I know you don't have the experience of writing three other novels with the same group, but what has it been like for you to spend time with all of them?
They feel like relatives. They feel like I'm in Sault Ste. Marie getting a cup of coffee somewhere. That's how real they feel to me, and I think that's a very Anishinaabe way of telling stories. It's to mention a character or have a family in one book and then two books later have a character from the first book built out. It's something Louise Erdrich does so well. She'll just mention a family in one book and then three books later the main character is from that family, and that's a very Anishinaabe way of storytelling because of the interconnectivity.
We commit to talking to writers about their books in ways that are 100% spoiler free. But I will say there is a turn of events in this book that I think might be difficult for readers of the other books, especially the first one. Are you expecting some blowback on Sisters in the Wind?
Probably. But once the book is written, it's not my baby anymore. The book becomes the readers' and they can have whatever reaction they want to it. I respect the reader to have whatever experience they have with the book. Take what resonates with you and leave the rest behind for someone else.
I will also say (spoiler free) that I came out of Sisters in the Wind with more questions about more characters, and I feel like there were some situations that I was thinking, how is that going to play out? Is there another installment planned?
Why yes, there is. I am under contract for a fourth book, and all three of my previous books have involved an element. So fire, earth, wind and my fourth book will involve the element of water. Water is where we get a lot of our women’s teachings. With everything that’s going on with the Great Lakes right now and the threat to the health and well-being of the water, I think it's the very best setting for telling another mystery thriller with strong Native women and the communities that they love.
Dare I ask how it's going?
I'm having more fun writing my fourth book than any previous books. I know enough about the process, like a first draft doesn't have to be pretty, it just has to be done. So I'm really enjoying writing and finding my character, getting to know her and her voice and it's still Firekeepers world and I am just happy to have more stories to tell.
Read an excerpt from Boulley’s latest book, Sisters of the Wind, below:
I float in a warm pond on a starless night. I need to stay calm. I breathe through the hollow stem of a bulrush. A familiar voice calls my name. Pleading for me to come back. I sink farther when the fury she's fighting to suppress ignites and spreads like wildfire. My breaths lengthen as my heartbeat slows. I thank my dad for teaching me to swim, dive and hold my breath and my birth mother for showing me how to disappear without a trace.
This interview has been edited and condensed from one conversation. Listen to and follow Stateside on Air wherever you get your podcasts.
