Wilson's deeply moving debut novel (after the nonfiction narrative Beloved Child: A Dakota Way of Life) unfurls the complex story of Rosalie Iron Wing and her search for connection to her family, her people, and the land. The novel opens with the voice of the Dakota people's seeds, passed down through generations ("We hold time in this space, we hold a thread to infinity that reaches all the way to the stars"). Rosalie's sole friend as a teen, Gaby Makepeace, is a strong young woman whose auntie teaches Rosalie about the bonds shared by Dakota women. At 18, pregnant and married to John, a white man, Rosalie tries to make a life for herself on John's farm, whose family founded it on land stolen from her ancestors, and whose inorganic farming practices alienate Rosalie from anti-GMO activist Gaby. Decades later, after John dies from cancer, Rosalie returns to her father's cabin where she grew up. While struggling to survive through a brutal winter, Rosalie delves into stories of her family's painful past, often shaped by dehumanizing interventions from the U.S. government. Wilson offers finely wrought descriptions of the natural world, as the voice of the seeds provides connective threads to the stories of her people. This powerful work achieves a deep resonance often lacking from activist novels, and makes a powerful statement along the way. (Mar.)

A Native American woman reclaims her family and her people's history in Dakhóta writer Wilson's first novel. A keening poem, "The Seeds Speak," sets the novel's tone in its opening pages, recalling a time when "Because we cared for each other, the People and the Seeds survived" and lamenting the "drought of memory, a time of endless darkness" that followed. Rosalie Iron Wing's story is emblematic of the deliberate destruction of Native American families and traditions by the U.S. government. Raised by her father, at age 12 she was placed in White foster care after he died and endured six years of misery "waiting for someone to come for me." (She doesn't know that her great-aunt fruitlessly tried to find her.) At 18, she marries John Meister, a kind White farmer grappling with the changes introduced by chemical fertilizers and the new genetically modified seeds being pushed by a company building a plant in town. (John, a good man who is nonetheless clueless about how his family's fortunes were built on the theft of Native lands, is notable in a cast of strong secondary characters that also includes Rosalie's feisty activist friend Gaby Makespeace.) As the novel opens in 2002, John has recently died, most likely poisoned by the chemicals their son, Tommy, encouraged him to use on their fields. Tommy's conflict between his Native heritage and modern "progress" seethes under the surface of Rosalie's journey back to the cabin along the Minnesota River from which she was taken 28 years earlier. Her memories unfold in conjunction with the stories of her great-aunt Darlene, about the tragic history of the Dakhóta. Uprooted from their land, the seeds Dakhóta women carried with them were not just a source of sustenance, but their link to the past and hope for the future, a symbol of their profound bond with the Earth. They provide a powerful symbol for Rosalie's rediscovery of her lost family and the ways of "the old ones." A thoughtful, moving meditation on connections to the past and the land that humans abandon at their peril. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Orphaned at a young age, Rosalie Iron Wing has been at society's margins all her life. While Rosalie was in foster care as a teen, her one friend got pregnant and was sent away. Now in early middle age, she is widowed. Grief and the need to remember her roots drive her to the family cabin, which has stood abandoned. There, she remembers the Dakota ways her father taught her, how to forage, hunt, and move quietly through snow and forest. Dakota writer Wilson's depiction of Rosalie would be story enough, but her debut novel sweeps generations and also encompasses the War of 1862, when the Dakota were ultimately removed from their land in Minnesota. Through the voices of other women from past and present, Wilson deepens the reader's understanding of what loss of language and culture has done to Indigenous people. In depicting the way Rosalie's ancestor Marie Blackbird and other women sew seeds into their clothing as the war breaks out, Wilson shows these women's relationship to and reverence for the land: a sharp contrast to "a country that destroys its soil," using the methods of modern agriculture and its effects upon waterways. A thought-provoking and engaging read.