National Book Award finalist Brandon Hobson (Where the Dead Sit Talking) turns again to Oklahoma as his setting for an insightful and compassionate novel of a Cherokee family's trauma and the healing powers of story and tradition.
When a police officer wrongfully shoots and kills a 15-year-old Cherokee boy, Ray-Ray, grief tears apart the Echota family of Quah, Okla. Fifteen years later, Ray-Ray's mother, Maria, still struggles with depression and to hold her family together. As she tries to organize a memorial bonfire on the anniversary of Ray-Ray's death, her spouse and children seem farther away than ever. Ray-Ray's father, Ernest, now 74 years old, has entered the early stages of Alzheimer's. When Maria agrees to foster Cherokee teen Wyatt, Ernest quickly decides the charismatic teen is Ray-Ray, returned from the Spirit World. As he spends time with Wyatt, Ernest's mental acuity mysteriously improves. Maria wonders if "this was a season for miracles to occur," not knowing her remaining children have both run into trouble.
An overdose sends 21-year-old Edgar Echota to an afterlife dimension called the Darkening Land, portrayed here as a Dantean hellscape of polluted land and air populated by treacherous people. And Sonja Echota, 31, has fixated on a younger man for mysterious reasons, telling the reader only, "This was not love--let me be clear on that."
Hobson, an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, blends everyday life with history and traditional stories. A raw and hopeful tale of tragedy and grace, The Removed invites re-readings to absorb fully its message of regrowth in the face of unspeakable sorrow. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads