Angeline Boulley's SISTERS IN THE WIND

​Thanks to partners NetGalley and Macmillan Children's Publishing Group for the digital ARC of Angeline Boulley’s Sisters in the Wind.

Sisters in the Wind is the third book in Angeline Boulley’s loosely connected YA trilogy, which includes Firekeeper’s Daughter and Warrior Girl Unearthed. Each focuses on a different teenager from the same Ojibwe community, though Lucy Smith, the protagonist of Sisters in the Wind, begins the book unaware of her heritage.

Lucy was raised by her white father who told her that her mother relinquished all parental rights when she was young. He told her the bare minimum about her mother, and so, after her father dies, and Lucy is left with only her cold, uncaring stepmother, she’s adrift. Eventually, after a definitive break with her stepmother, Lucy navigates the foster system on her own.

The novel opens with Lucy working in a diner and on her own—she feels safer without close relationships, and so she has tried to keep herself at a distance from everyone. If someone gets too close, she leaves.

When an attorney shows up at the diner with what seems to be a random offer of help, Lucy is immediately suspicious and starts planning her escape, ready to pack up and leave to keep herself safe.

And then something happens that keeps her firmly in place.

Sisters in the Wind is set between Boulley’s previous books, and it was lovely to revisit characters from those novels. Lucy is a compelling protagonist, and her journey to finding the truth about her identity and the support of the community that she’s never known is a powerful one. I greatly appreciated the information woven through the book about the Indian Child Welfare Act, and how it should have protected Lucy from the lack of connection that has plagued her.

As in Firekeeper’s Daughter and, particularly, Warrior Girl Unearthed, there’s also a sort of mystery/thriller plot that propels the story, and I didn’t find it to be quite as seamless as I’d hoped, though I certainly wanted to know how everything would resolve.

Despite that caveat, I’m a big fan of Boulley’s work, and I’ll definitely be eager to read whatever she writes next. I’ll absolutely be including this one in my classroom library. 

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