Bone Dance

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

Martha Brooks’s second young-adult novel possesses a remarkable and
engaging yin-and-yang quality. Divided into two parts, the work features
two late-teen protagonists who ultimately come together to form a
unified whole.

Alex Sinclair, 17, lives with her Dene mother in Winnipeg, while Lonny
LaFreniere, 18, resides with his Métis stepfather, Pop, in Manitoba’s
Lacs des Placottes Valley Hills. What will eventually unite Alex and
Lonny is a piece of unspoiled lake property that has been in Lonny’s
family since the days of the first LaFreniere, a Métis trapper and
buffalo hunter. To finance Lonny’s future education, Pop recently sold
his cherished land to Earl McKay, Alex’s nomadic, drunken father, who
deserted his wife following Alex’s birth. For 17 years, Earl’s sole
contact with Alex has been half a dozen brief letters, but now his death
has surprisingly brought her ownership of the land. When a bitter Alex
reluctantly visits the property, she meets Lonny, whose memories of this
land are tinged by guilt: he believes that his childhood act of digging
up and “disturbing” bones at Medicine Bluff, a Dene burial ground,
“killed” his mother.

Although Brooks uses the third person, she varies the narrator’s
perspective throughout the book’s parts. In “The Spirits,” readers
come to know Alex and Lonny through their separate histories. In “The
Legacy,” the perspective shifts back and forth between Alex and Lonny
as they “connect” and finally exorcise their demons.

This crossover title, will find an audience among senior-year students
and adults. Highly recommended.