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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Sep 2023, 352 pages
Paperback:
Oct 15, 2024, 352 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Kathleen Basi
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In her remarkable second novel following her Governor General's Award-winning debut, The Summer of Bitter and Sweet, Jen Ferguson writes about the hurt of a life stuck in past tense, the hum of connections that cannot be severed, and one week in a small, snowy town that changes everything.
Overachievement isn't a bad word—for Berlin, it's the goal. She's securing excellent grades, planning her future, and working a part-time job at Pink Mountain Pizza, a legendary local business. Who says she needs a best friend by her side?
Dropping out of high school wasn't smart—but it was necessary for Cameron. Since his cousin Kiki's disappearance, it's hard enough to find the funny side of life, especially when the whole town has forgotten Kiki. To them, she's just another missing Native girl.
People at school label Jessie a tease, a rich girl—and honestly, she's both. But Jessie knows she contains multitudes. Maybe her new job crafting pizzas will give her the high-energy outlet she desperately wants.
When the weekend at Pink Mountain Pizza takes several unexpected turns, all three teens will have to acknowledge the various ways they've been hurt—and how much they need each other to hold it all together.
Jen Ferguson burst onto the YA scene with her first novel, which was a William C. Morris Award Finalist and a Stonewall Award Honor Book, and this second novel fulfills her promise as one of the most thoughtful and exciting YA writers today.
Friday Afternoon
Calgary Herald headline: "Promising" Indigenous Teen Reported Missing First Week of School
BERLIN
No one had noticed her new cat-eye glasses, bright red, with very faux diamonds spread across the rise like perfectly positioned stars. Not a single person had said a thing. All morning long. And now the other members of the First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Student Association—the FNMISA for short—were too busy arguing about their upcoming fundraiser to notice that Berlin wasn't fully present. She sat at a desk, her body oriented toward the circle, tracing a rough sketch of a pipe on the grimy surface with her finger.
"But should we really be calling them Indian tacos?" Darcie asked, then promptly took a bite of her bologna sandwich.
She was a year younger, Métis from Lac Ste. Anne, whereas Berlin's family was from Treaty 1 and the Red River region. Berlin had recruited Darcie for the FNMISA. It was lunchtime. They were meeting in Mr. MacDonald's ...
Ferguson crafts a story so tightly interwoven and intimate in focus that each character cannot help pushing their castmates' stories forward alongside their own. The end result is an engrossing, thought-provoking, and ultimately beautiful book...continued
Full Review
(644 words)
(Reviewed by Kathleen Basi).
.jpg "MMIWG2S Protest, Montreal 2014")
The emotional crisis faced by the protagonists of Jen Ferguson's Those Pink Mountain Nights stems from the disappearance of a mother and daughter from a First Nations community in Alberta, Canada. Although the book keeps its focus tight, on the intimate stories of a handful of teens, the characters occasionally reference the larger issue of Indigenous women and girls going missing.
This is a problem that impacts communities in the United States as well as in Canada. A 2018 survey of 71 U.S. cities by Annita Lucchesi and Abigail Echo-Hawk reported that murder is the third leading cause of death for Native women. That year, 5,712 Indigenous women and girls were reported missing in the United States, but only 116 were logged into the ...
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