Manikanetish
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In Naomi Fontaine’s Governor General’s Literary Award finalist, a young teacher’s return to her remote Innu community transforms the lives of her students, reminding us of the importance of hope in the face of despair.
After fifteen years of exile, Yammie, a young Innu woman, has come back to her home in Uashat, on Quebec’s North Shore. She has returned to teach at the local school but finds a community stalked by despair. Yammie will do anything to help her students. When she accepts a position directing the end-of-year play, she sees an opportunity for the youth to take charge of themselves.
In writing both spare and polyphonic, Naomi Fontaine honestly portrays a year of Yammie’s teaching and of the lives of her students, dislocated, embattled, and ultimately, possibly, triumphant.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In this heartwarming novel, a young woman returns home to become a teacher and ultimately learns more from her students than she ever expected. After graduating from college, Yammie moves back to the Uashat reserve she grew up on in northern Québec, hoping to serve her community and reconnect with her heritage. Naomi Fontaine draws on her own experiences as a teacher and member of the Innu First Nation to tell this beautiful story through short, poetic vignettes. By focusing more on the students’ small, everyday adventures than the systemic struggles they face, Fontaine makes her young characters feel very relatable. We follow them as they put on a school play and embark on a weeklong camping trip in the woods, picking up hard-won confidence and pride as they go. This is a brief but deeply meaningful novel about the loving power of community.
