real ones
a novel
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
*LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 GILLER PRIZE*
*FINALIST FOR THE 2025 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD*
From the author of the nationally bestselling Strangers saga comes a heartrending story of two Michif sisters who must face their past trauma when their mother is called out for false claims to Indigenous identity.
June and her sister, lyn, are NDNs—real ones.
Lyn has her pottery artwork, her precocious kid, Willow, and the uncertain terrain of her midlife to keep her mind, heart and hands busy. June, a Métis Studies professor, yearns to uproot from Vancouver and move. With her loving partner, Sigh, and their faithful pup, June decides to buy a house in the last place on earth she imagined she’d end up: back home in Winnipeg with her family.
But then into lyn and June’s busy lives a bomb drops: their estranged and very white mother, Renee, is called out as a “pretendian.” Under the name (get this) Raven Bearclaw, Renee had topped the charts in the Canadian art world for winning awards and recognition for her Indigenous-style work.
The news is quickly picked up by the media and sparks an enraged online backlash. As the sisters are pulled into the painful tangle of lies their mother has told and the hurt she has caused, searing memories from their unresolved childhood trauma, which still manages to spill into their well curated adult worlds, come rippling to the surface.
In prose so powerful it could strike a match, real ones is written with the same signature wit and heart on display in The Break, The Strangers and The Circle. An energetic, probing and ultimately hopeful story, real ones pays homage to the long-fought, hard-won battles of Michif (Métis) people to regain ownership of their identity and the right to say who is and isn’t Métis.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In this powerful novel, Métis author Katherena Vermette puts the impact of cultural appropriation in deeply personal terms. Métis sisters lyn and June are devastated when they learn, along with the rest of the world, that their mother, Renee—an artist who’s built a career around her Indigenous identity—is not Métis at all. An investigative journalist reveals that Renee is a “pretendian” who cultivated her Native identity through stories from the life of lyn and June’s father, and even from her daughters themselves. Vermette uses spare but gorgeous prose to explore the ensuing emotions that the sisters move through, especially in their captivating phone conversations. The cascade of issues that they face in the wake of the scandal is truly eye-opening, as the pair find themselves grappling with resentment, reliving their childhood experiences, and even having their own identities called into question. real ones is an intimate portrait of the personal, social, and political damage that stems from falsely claiming Indigenous identity.
