A review copy has been provided by Levine Querido through Netgalley
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While I was browsing through NetGalley—they emailed me because I’d been inactive, and I thought, why not get review books again?—I stumbled upon this curious middle-grade book. These stories tend to be quick and accessible, so when I saw that it was ready to download and didn’t require approval, I decided to grab it.
Cynthia Haggard’s family goes to stay with her grandparents. There, she and her two siblings meet their grandmother and extremely racist grandfather for the first time.
During their stay, their curiosity leads them to discover a secret storage space in their grandparents’ house. Inside, they find a letter written by a child named Violet.
This discovery makes Cynthia want to find out what happened to Violet. And this is where the story officially begins.
The book’s pacing was a little slow for me. The first 25% felt largely like setup leading to the discovery of the letter, but nothing particularly significant seemed to happen until around the 75% mark.
More than a mystery, the story felt strongly like literary fiction. Much of it focused on the children’s day-to-day lives, their struggles as Indigenous kids, and the ever-so-slow uncovering of Violet’s story.
It was a fantastic read in the sense that there was much to learn, and it even encouraged me to do some research into Indigenous history and experiences. However, it felt lacking in the areas where I had expected it to shine. I wanted the excitement of a middle-grade detective story. What I got instead was a dark story rooted in history.
That didn’t make it a bad book, but at times, its message felt a little too overt for me. Some of its lessons seemed to take precedence over the mystery rather than emerging naturally from it, which made certain moments feel misplaced within the story.
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