The Firekeeper's Daughter by Angeline Boulley

This book has a lot going for it and a lot going on. At the center of the book is Daunis, a graduating high school student with a complicated past and an equally complicated present. The novel opens with her in the middle of traumatic change, as her maternal grandmother has just had a stroke and months previously her maternal uncle was found dead of a meth overdose. Daunis is the biracial daughter of a white mother and an Anishinaabe man, which was a scandal at the time-- her mother was a teenager when she became pregnant, and shortly thereafter her father got another woman pregnant and married her--so Daunis has a half brother who is just a few months younger than her. The book has so much going on-- issues related to native rights, identity, traditions, and language, another is what is kinship and what does it mean, what is community and membership, then there is the problem of drugs in general and meth in particular. Then there is the role of sports in a community and how it shapes things. Finally, there are issues of responsibility--it is a very well done coming of age book and the Obamas thought so too because they bought the rights to make it into a television series.