All fired up over: From the Ashes

Sandy, Breaking the Pattern, has now launched! If you haven’t yet had a chance to pick up your copy, head on over to my blog post and pick up Sandy and some other great YA contemporary books now!

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme. Read the rules and more teasers at The Purple Booker. Anyone can play along.

Wow, this one is an amazing read. In From the Ashes, My Story of Being Indigenous, Homeless, and Finding My Way, Jesse Thistle tells about the road he travelled, homeless and in and out of prison for decades before managing to overcome his addiction, enter university, and discover his Métis heritage while working on a BA in history. He is now a speaker on indigenous history, homelessness, and intergenerational trauma.

(Although I do not have direct experience with intergenerational trauma, I have also written about it in my fiction book Questing for a Dream.)

This is a great memoir. But it is very gritty and graphic and includes plenty of foul language, so don’t read it if you are sensitive to those things. But if you want to know what it is like growing up like Jesse Thistle, abandoned by his parents and mostly raised by his grandparents without access to his indigenous heritage, struggling to break the hold of addiction, this book is very enlightening.

It reminded me very much of Street Child, Justin Reed Early’s memoir of growing up on the streets of Seattle and San Francisco, addicted and facing many of the same challenges. Each of them…