August 7
When I tell you that my white name is Cedar Hawk Songmaker and that I am the adopted child of Minneapolis liberals, and that when I went looking for my Ojibwe parents and found that I was born Mary Potts I hid the knowledge, maybe you’ll understand. Or not.
The number of novels which hand the reader a bare-bones, stripped-down summary of its entire storyline in its opening line. The very first line of this novel does not merely foreshadow its narrative trek; it totally reveals it. Literally everything that constitutes “the plot” of this novel can be found in its opening line. Admittedly, some important details are missing, but the details tangential to what actually happens step by step to the narrator which is that her story is about discovering she was adopted and finding her biological family. The tangential element of why she wants to find out her biology is, of course, what makes it worth reading.
“They’re offering rewards now for anyone who turns in a pregnant neighbor, acquaintance, family member, whatever. There’s billboards. Ads up on lampposts. It’s true.”
This is one of those tangential parts of the story that make it worth reading. Technically, it’s true that the opening line is a summary of what happens over the course of this story, but the important part there is the bare bones part. It’s like saying a bare-bones summary of The Wizard of Oz is a girl and her dog are transported to a strange faraway place where she kills a witch before waking up and realizing it was a dream. The interest is in the details. The details of Cedar’s story of discovering her true biological identity lies in the face that this discovery takes place in an America of the five minutes from now which has finally become the right-wing theocratic dystopia it’s on the verge of becoming since Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act and became the unwitting catalyst for creating the right-wing media propaganda machine. Oh, and another important detail: Cedar is pregnant.
“Of course. When I was eighteen. For you, not vaccinating me was a class thing. Upper-class delusionals can afford to indulge their paranoias only because the masses bear the so-called dangers of vaccinations.”
Though published in 2017, much of the story seems like it was written after 2020 because much of the story seems like America in 2021. For instance, the absurd paranoia about the covid-19 vaccines stimulated by ridiculous conspiracy theories gives this scene a new sort of resonance. In this case, the conspiracy theories lead a gullible upper class liberal to unwittingly risk her adopted daughter’s life, but the realization of this horrific decision in the wake of the harsh reality that her submitting to unfounded rumors rings much more palpably true in light of so many demonstrations of this happening in the real world just a few years after the novel’s publication. It is also a reminder of that the ideological mistrust of the other side cuts both ways in the hyper-partisan America represented in the book and in real life.
