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OLDER FICTION
Dimaline, Cherie

Funeral Songs for Dying Girls

280 pp. | Tundra | April, 2023 | Trade ISBN 9780735265639 $17.99 | Ebook ISBN 9780735265646 $10.99
(2) YA First-person narrator Winifred, a Canadian teen of Metis and European descent, lives in present-day Toronto with her father, who is a crematory operator, on the grounds of the cemetery, between "the grubby and the austere"--a ravine where drug users hang out, and the gentrified neighborhood of Cabbagetown. Winifred is ostracized at school because of her morbid surroundings, and as she sees it, she has "lived a fairy-tale childhood. Like, a Grimm's fairy tale." Her own mother's ashes are half buried in the cemetery and half kept in the house, and her father lives a "half-life," yearning for his lost love. Ghosts haunt Winifred, both figuratively and literally, but Dimaline's (The Marrow Thieves) intense, bittersweet, and often funny novel is more than a ghost story. Extended portions about the life and death of Phil, a sympathetically rendered ghost character who becomes one of Winifred's first loves, allude to the real-life neglected epidemic of MMIWG2S (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People). Through this novel, Dimaline (Metis Nation of Ontario) honors those lost; as Winifred's Metis auntie says, "So lucky, you, to live in this place with so many people. Imagine a world without your dead? I'd be so lonely walking around by yourself like that."
Reviewer: | Horn Book Magazine Issue: March, 2023

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