It’s evening on Christmas day, and I just remembered that I also finished another book that I need to tell you about. The Theory of Crows is the first adult novel written by award-winning Canadian children’s author David A Robertson, and it follows estranged father Matthew and his daughter Hallelujah (Holly) as they try to find their way back to what they had before they began to drift apart. Matt works long hours and is trading flirtation online texts with a colleague rather than being home with his wife and fifteen-year-old daughter Holly. He is himself feeling adrift in his world, unconnected to anything and filled with emptiness. Holly also shares these feelings of emptiness and desperately needs to renew the connection with her father, but she won’t beg and he has to earn it. When something happens that changes their lives, they go on a journey of self-discovery and healing that may bring them closer to one another and to the land, as well as to an understanding of how they are all connected. I have never read anything by this author, and this book started out really well, but somewhere along the way I felt it got a bit muddled. The messages in the book were good ones, but I felt that it got a bit repetitive and empty (for lack of a better word) after the halfway point, and I didn’t really feel that the ending redeemed the novel. Still, it was interesting enough and educational in terms of Indigenous thoughts and feelings about the land and their connection to it, so if you were looking for a novel about the Indigenous experience, especially one that doesn’t dwell on residential schools, this wouldn’t be a bad one to pick up. My one big concern was Robertson’s use of the “f” word, which was scattered liberally across every page in differing forms. I’m generally not offended by language, but this seemed excessive even by my loose standards, and I wondered while reading it why he chose to do this. Anyway, there you go, another book to consider.
Have a good night!
Bye for now…Julie
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