James Nicoll Reviews

Broken Ego, Broken Heart

Funeral Songs for Dying Girls

By Cherie Dimaline

19 Jan, 2024

**Doing the WFC's Homework**

1 comment

Cherie Dimaline’s 2023 Funeral Songs for Dying Girls is a stand-alone modern fantasy.

Sixteen-year-old Winifred “Win” Blight lives with her taciturn father in the Winterson Cemetery¹, where her father operates the crematorium. While living in a house² on cemetery grounds has its drawbacks — fellow students (the jerks) call Win “Wednesday Addams³” — Win has lived there her whole life and it’s all she knows. News that declining business may force the crematorium to shut down is unwelcome news, as the Blight home is a free perk of graveyard employment.

Win has one card to play: the cemetery ghost.

Don’t Ask Forever

The Marrow Thieves

By Cherie Dimaline

17 Mar, 2023

**Doing the WFC's Homework**

0 comments

Cherie Dimaline’s 2017 The Marrow Thieves is a near-future science fiction novel.

The government of Canada’s Department of Oneirology has reopened the residential schools, this time as medical processing centres. First Nations people go in. Dreams and corpses come out. All that’s needed is suitable donors, people like Frenchy and his Anishnaabe kin.