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Book Summary and Reviews of Where They Last Saw Her by Marcie R. Rendon

Where They Last Saw Her by Marcie R. Rendon

Where They Last Saw Her

A Novel

by Marcie R. Rendon

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  • Published:
  • Sep 2024, 336 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

From the award-winning author of the Cash Blackbear series comes a compelling novel of a Native American woman who learns of the disappearance of one of her own and decides enough is enough.

All they heard was her scream.

Quill has lived on the Red Pine reservation in Minnesota her whole life. She knows what happens to women who look like her. Just a girl when Jimmy Sky jumped off the railway bridge and she ran for help, Quill realizes now that she's never stopped running. As she trains for the Boston Marathon early one morning out in the woods, she hears a scream. When she returns to search the area, all she finds are tire tracks and a single beaded earring.

Things are different now for Quill than when she was a lonely girl. Her friends Punk and Gaylyn are two women who don't know what it means to quit; her loving husband, Crow, and their two beautiful children challenge her to be better every day. So when she hears a second woman has been stolen, she is determined to do something about it—starting with investigating the group of men working the pipeline construction just north of their homes.

As Quill closes in on the truth about the missing women, someone else disappears. In her quest to find justice for all of the women of the reservation, she is confronted with the hard truths of their home and the people who purport to serve them. When will she stop losing neighbors, friends, family? As Quill puts everything on the line to make a difference, the novel asks searing questions about bystander culture, the reverberations of even one act of crime, and the long-lasting trauma of being considered invisible.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Rendon's book will break your heart, but it will also inspire and inform." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Rendon has delivered a top-shelf crime story that doubles as a moving testament to Native American resilience." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A stunning thriller ... Great characterization and propulsive plot, built around a current, terrifying reality." —Booklist (starred review)

"Rendon masterfully navigates the histories of trauma and brutality that continue to exist within our Native communities, laying bare the truths of colonial violence and the continuing need for closure and justice in our homelands." —Ramona Emerson, author of Shutter

This information about Where They Last Saw Her was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Marcie R. Rendon

Marcie R. Rendon, citizen of the White Earth Nation, is one of O: The Oprah Magazine's 31 Native American Authors to Read Right Now and a McKnight Distinguished Artist Award winner. Her debut novel, Murder on the Red River, received the Pinckley Prize for Debut Novel Award and was a finalist for the Western Writers of America Spur Award, Contemporary Novel category, and her second novel, Girl Gone Missing, was nominated for the G. P. Putnam's Sons Sue Grafton Memorial Award. Her script, Say Their Names, will be produced by Out of Hand Theater in Atlanta, Georgia. And her script Sweet Revenge had a staged reading at the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The creative mind of Raving Native Theater, she curated Twin Cities Public Television's Art Is ... CreativeNativeResilience. Rendon received the Loft Literary Center's Spoken Word Immersion Fellowship with co-creator Diego Vazquez for their work with incarcerated women.

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