Three Day Road

A wonderfully immersive story, that pulls you into the WWI trenches with two Canadian Cree Indians and constructs a tale of ancestry and destiny, the horrors of war and the healing it requires. Xavier Bird, Elijah Whiskeyjack and their ‘auntie', medicine woman Niska, are memorable characters. The book definitely deserves all the accolades it received.

Three Day Road is three intertwined stories: The framing story of a Cree woman who has traveled to the city to collect her nephew, Xavier, who has returned home from the battlefields of the first world war missing a leg and with a new addiction to morphine. As they paddle their canoe home, Niska (the aunt) relates the story of her life to Xavier, and he narrates the story of his experience as a sniper in the trenches of France* to the reader as he slips in and out of morphine-fueled dreams. The three stories being told together help strengthen one another, providing insight into each other and deepening the emotional links between them.

This was a very powerful, although dense, read. It takes a perspective on war that isn't entirely unique (“War is tragedy not only for what soldiers do to their enemy, but also because of the type of person it changes them into”), but it's a perspective that's told very strongly and, because of the Native background of the protagonists, it does have something of a unique spin on it.

*Apparently there's a factual basis to this part of the story: due to their experience as hunters, Native soldiers made for some of the top snipers in the Canadian and British forces during WWI.