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 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. Meanwhile, 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." Told primarily in Maria's, Sonja's and Edgar's voices, the narrative also includes short passages in the voice of Tsala, a Cherokee man murdered by soldiers because he would not leave Cherokee land during their forced removal onto the Trail of Tears.
Hobson, an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, blends everyday life with history and traditional stories in a dark but gorgeous cascade of echoes, linking modern-day racism to the legacy of racist policy and showing the perpetuation of trauma against a minority culture. However, a network of healing also surrounds the Echotas as they go through a crucible that may either restore or destroy. An ordinary family tangled in a terrible loss, they experience the power of the extraordinary as spirits intervene on their behalf and old stories prove themselves true and vital. A raw and hopeful tale of tragedy and grace, The Removed invites multiple re-readings to appreciate fully Hobson's many interconnected threads and to absorb its message of regrowth in the face of unspeakable sorrow. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads
Shelf Talker: National Book Award finalist Hobson follows his debut with an emotional story of a grieving Cherokee family who experience miracles in line with their traditional beliefs.