Sharon aimed at the seven ball. “Did you hear about that chick who disappeared from Dahl Hall? Kids are saying maybe she got pregnant and went home. Then someone said she hitchhiked down to the Cities, but she hasn’t come back. Her parents were at the Dean’s office this morning.”
I subscribe to Raven Reads (a quarterly surprise goodie box that contains Indigenous books and merchandise), so it’s out of my control if I’m sent a book that doesn’t really match my reading tastes. Girl Gone Missing is billed as a Mystery (in the “Gone Girl on the Train” fashion) — which probably wouldn’t grab my attention these days — and while author Marcie R. Rendon has created a really interesting main character in amateur sleuth Renee “Cash” Blackbear, as the second book in a series, I ended up playing a lot of catch up with her back story…and not really enjoying the mystery. I want to acknowledge that after reading the Author’s Note at the end, I can appreciate what Rendon was trying to share with her audience about both the scourge of missing Indigenous women and the lingering trauma for those Indigenous children who were raised in abusive white foster homes — and it’s for these insights that I love my reading subscription and did find interest in this novel — but this is not really in my wheelhouse and others have enjoyed it more; perhaps take my review with a grain of salt and pick it up yourself.
Cash leafed through the dresses as if they were pages of a book. Images flashed through her mind as she touched each one: A classroom full of laughing kids. A dance at the Legion Hall. A church choir singing loudly. She touched a soft blue wool sweater — goose bumps ran up her arm. She shivered and saw a girl floating over a dirt field calling, “Help me.”
From the first page, we realise that Cash (an enrolled member of the White Earth Chippewa Nation) has dreams and waking visions that might be helpful in solving crimes. We eventually learn that she was raised in a series of abusive foster families, and after a local sheriff rescued her and set her up in an apartment in Fargo — and encouraged the bright young woman to use a government program to enrol in Moorhead State college across the Red River in Minnesota — she is now, reluctantly, enduring her first semester of higher education. Cash spends her days in class, her evenings driving a dump truck for the local farmers’ beet harvest, and her spare time smoking Marlboros, drinking Bud, and practising her pool skills at the local dive bar. When a local girl goes missing, the sheriff, Wheaton, enlists Cash’s help in finding her.
The story is set in the Seventies and the streets are filled with bell-bottomed Free Love hippies, shell-shocked Vietnam vets, and long-braided members of the nascent American Indian Movement. Despite a really challenging personal history, Cash seems a bit naive about the real world — people explain to her what a pimp is and confirm that the Grain Exchange that’s she’s heard about on the radio is a real place in “the Cities” down South — but even so, when called upon, Cash will put herself in danger to help others.
He looked at her and smiled, a smile that reached his eyes. “Good one,” was all he said. It was enough — but not quite enough to fill the enormous void created by all of the losses she’d had during her short lifetime. But she kept those feelings from her eyes and grinned back at Wheaton.
Again: The mystery element was pretty straightforward and solved easily, but as Rendon explains in her Author’s Note, she wanted to have Cash help look for some missing white girls in order to highlight the plight of “missing, murdered, and unwanted women everywhere” and demonstrate the character’s generosity in showing concern for people who were not from her own community; a lesson we could all learn in the face of the disproportionate number of Indigenous women who disappear across North America. And that’s worth reading about.
