Soft as Bones: A Memoir

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. (May)

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.