Indigenous People’s Day is in October, and Angeline Boulley’s newest book surrounding the Chippewa tribe of Sault St. Marie, Michigan is the perfect way to honor America’s own first citizens. Sisters in the Wind starts with a bang and draws readers into the dark web of the foster system, generational trauma, and illegal adoptions in a blazing fashion. Lucy, our protagonist, emerges from an explosion at the diner where she works to find a native woman she doesn’t know. It is her own birth sister’s best friend, Daunis. Daunis was first introduced in Boulley’s Firekeeper’s Daughter but returns now as a mentor rather than a teenager herself. Told through a series of flashbacks interspersed between her present recovery from the blast, Lucy’s story unfurls.

 Lucy was taken by her father after her mother proved incapable and she lived as a straitlaced, Catholic school girl. But when her father remarries and then dies of colorectal cancer her seemingly perfect stepmother abandons her. Robbed of her rightful inheritance by the woman, Lucy is forced into the foster system. Another blaze takes her from her first placement on an island with a caring woman and foster sister and she winds up with a foster brother who attempts to take advantage of her. When the family won’t listen to her, she is labeled as troubled and sent to Hoppy Farm with multiple foster siblings. The farm, however, isn’t thriving on the crops they grow in the field…but within the foster girls. Lucy takes it on herself to uncover their illegal source of income and ends up on the run from the Hoppy family. When the explosion hit the diner, she was rescued by Daunis and Jamie, a former undercover officer working on the tribal Sault St. Marie meth ring. They are now working on her behalf to reclaim her true heritage and prove that Lucy is an innocent victim of multiple government systems that continue to plague America’s most Native citizens.

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