Published by Tin House, June 2024
As humans we share many experiences regardless of our cultural differences. One thing we all hold in common is the awakening process by which we become aware of who we really are. As Charles Lomasway, protagonist of Morgan Talty’s premier novel Fire Exit says:
“We are made of stories, and if we don’t know them—the ones that make you—how will we ever be fully realized? How can we ever be who we truly are?”
Charles lives his life on the periphery of the Penobscot reservation on Indian Island, a community where he was raised. At the age of eighteen, by tribal law, he had to leave the home of his father because his mother was non-native. Yet, he lived close enough to be able to keep an eye on his daughter Elizabeth as she matured in the home of her Penobscot mother just across the river, unaware that he is her father.
The truth about the character Elizabeth swimming in the mix of her bloods, native and non, will need to be revealed for her to feel who she is. Can the influence of her cultural identities can be revealed. Again, the narrator speaks:
“But she needed to know that her blood was her blood. Nothing could take that away, and nothing could even come close, to capturing it, especially not percentages on pieces of paper. Because we’re more than that. Or at least she was—she’d got it in her, that connection to the past and people, no matter what anyone said.”
So, here we have a modern world seemingly defined by legal terms and racial biases which reduce the contents of a people’s past to archaic cliches. How dark the future can be if individual and cultural identities trap each one of Talty’s persons in dead end lives. Is there a way to brighten that darkness and save at least one or two lives?
Find out by reading this fantastic novel.
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