In one of my many cookbooks, I have a recipe for freezer-cookies. Basically, the recipe is this: find a bunch of sweet things you like to eat, mix them into little balls stuck together with peanut butter, put balls in freezer. Done. I make them sometimes when I have a variety of baking supplies (chocolate chips, dried fruit, nuts, seeds, etc.) and just want something quick. Do they do the trick? Yes. Are they really that satisfying? Well ...

And therein is my issue with Tears in the Grass by Lynda A. Archer. It does the trick of being a quick-to-make-out story; it has everything in it, and I do mean everything (residential schools, rape, forced adoptions, sexism, racism, discrimination, the thoughts of a taxidermied bison, First Nations rights, LGBTQ issues, murder); but, ultimately the peanut butter to stick the balls together (to return to my already weak metaphor) just isn't there. In three hundred pages, so much is thrown at us, one thing after another, that by the final page, it's a bit like getting to the end of a marathon. The book wears me out. Plus, much like my last review, there's a bit of wish fulfillment it seems going on here. Everything ties up in a nice tidy bow. Uplifting sure. Realistic, well ... (a missing Cree senior in Saskatchewan is on the news in Ontario? I don't buy it.)

Plus I'm more interested in the side stories: What was it like for Louise to go to law school in the 1930s as a Cree woman? Are Alice and Wanda going to continue seeing each other? Why didn't Elinor search for her baby earlier? Does John have any personality at all? Why is the whole novel set in the sixties when it could just as easily be set now?

Overall, an okay book. Would likely be improved with less internal thoughts of a stuffed bison and more plot and character development.

Tears in the Grass by Lynda A. Archer went on sale March 19, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. ( )

It is 1968. Elinor Greystone is a 90+-year-old Cree woman living in the Qu’Appelle Valley in Saskatchewan. As she nears the end of her life, she feels an urgent need to find her first daughter, Bright Eyes, the result of a rape at a residential school. Elinor enlists the help of Alice, her granddaughter, and Louise, her daughter, to find Bright Eyes, the child forcibly taken from Elinor over seven decades earlier.

Red Sky in the Morning, a.k.a. Elinor, is a character the reader will come to love and admire. She has not had an easy life, as she herself admits, having “’survived residential school, the theft of my first-born, the loss of babies, the murder of my husband.’” Yet she retains a stamina and tenacity that belie her years, and she sees beauty in the natural world around her. Her wisdom and her connection to nature especially make her a memorable character; she speaks to animals, even a stuffed bison in a natural history museum which she visits regularly.

This is the first novel I have read which is written from the perspective of a residential school survivor. What makes the novel’s message powerful is that we see the treatment of Indians from a personal perspective. This book could very well have become a political diatribe about the horrors of residential schools, but the author merely touches on some of what happened, and that is enough to convey the horrors of that experience. Elinor’s comment that the school was “a canker, sucking life from all that entered” is an effective description.

It is not just Elinor who emerges as a round character. Her daughter Louise and her granddaughter Alice are also developed. Each of these women has secrets because “shame holds secrets like a banker’s vault” but “Secrets are like pods of the milkweed. They always burst open.” Each woman is also compelled to examine herself to acquire a better sense of who she is, especially in terms of her relationship with her Native heritage. Louise escaped the reservation on which she lived and has long been alienated from her culture; Alice wants her heritage to inform her life.

This book is definitely a worthwhile read. It has a strong, memorable character and it addresses an aspect of Canadian history of which we should all be aware. The novel speaks to both the mind and the heart.

Note: I received an ARC of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.

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Beautifully written with vivid descriptions. Elinor and the Bison's descriptions and stories transport you to a different time and place. You can smell the sweet grass and the wind on your face as you watch the Bison freely roam the plains. This book brings forth that pain of a culture that was robbed and torn apart as well as the beauty and glory of seeing the world through the eyes of Elinor who still speaks to the trees and the rivers. Who still speaks her Cree language and visits the Bison exhibit at the Nature History Museum.

Elinor is nearing the end of her life and is driven to find the daughter she lost so many years ago. Against all odds she believes that she is still alive and enlists her estranged daughter Louise who shuns most things Indian and her granddaughter Alice who is struggling with her sexuality. Can these three women find peace along with the missing part of their family? ( )

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. ( )