Soft as Bones
A Memoir
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A CBC Best Book of 2025
Finalist, Foreword INDIES 2025 Book of the Year
A poetic memoir as intricately woven as a dreamcatcher about overcoming the pain of generational trauma with the power of traditional healing
In candid, incisive, and delicate prose, Chyana Marie Sage shares the pain of growing up with her father, a crack dealer who went to prison for molesting her older sister. In revisiting her family’s history, Chyana examines the legacy of generational abuse, which began with her father’s father, who was forcibly removed from his family by the residential schools and Sixties Scoop programs. Yet hers is also a story of hope, as it was the traditions of her people that saved her life, healing one small piece in the mosaic that makes up the dark past of colonialism shared by Indigenous people throughout Turtle Island.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Essayist Sage debuts with a harrowing account of her poverty-stricken childhood in Edmonton, Alberta. Sage's father, a descendant of the Woodland Cree tribe, dealt drugs and began molesting Sage's older sister, Orleane, when she was a teenager. When Sage's father got Orleane pregnant, the girls' Métis mother uprooted the family and began moving from place to place. Sage searched for someone to "save" her during her unstable adolescence, entering a string of fraught, codependent relationships and attempting suicide before briefly living with an aunt on the West Coast, entering therapy, and beginning to write. Throughout, Sage buttresses her story with snatches of Indigenous stories (much of which she learned from her parents) and research into Canada's 20th-century child welfare policies, which called for the removal of Indigenous children from their homes so they could be integrated into "mainstream" society, but led to be widespread abuse by host families and government officials. She toggles effortlessly between the roles of diarist, poet, and journalist, linking her personal history to a pattern of intergenerational violence, all without snuffing out hope for healing. Readers will be as inspired as they are horrified. Correction: A previous version of this review incorrectly stated that the author's father molested her. The review also mischaracterized the details of the author's stay with her aunt and when she entered therapy.
