Warrior Girl Unearthed
Angeline Boulley

I loved Boulley’s breakout novel, Firekeeper’s Daughter, and this sophomore novel is equally as enjoyable. This book has some overlapping characters and settings with Boulley’s first, but it is not a true sequel. Our main character, 16-year-old Perry, is prepared to take it easy and go fishing every day on her summer vacation when she gets into a minor car accident and her aunt Daunis forces her to take an internship in order to pay off the damage to the car. Perry’s program initially bores her, until she attends a meeting at a nearby university and begins to learn about NAGPRA, which is a law that allows tribes to request the return of remains and sacred objects from institutions. Perry is stunned and enraged to learn that many institutions, including the university she attends the meeting at, use legal loopholes to hold on to these important cultural items and ancestral remains. With this new information and purpose, Perry and her friends devote themselves to doing whatever they can to return stolen items and remains, but a sudden murder and the continuing disappearances of Anishinaabe women in Perry’s community add danger to this mission. This is a thrilling YA novel that adults will certainly enjoy. It tackles a number of current issues facing Native communities, like the MMIW Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women epidemic and NAGPRA law. There are helpful resources and further reading about these issues in the back of the book. 

The copies we have in the store are autographed.