Split Tooth
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Average rating4.5
"A girl grows up in Nunavut in the 1970s. She knows joy, and friendship, and parents' love. She knows boredom, and listlessness, and bullying. She knows the tedium of the everyday world, and the raw, amoral power of the ice and sky, the seductive energy of the animal world. She knows the ravages of alcohol, and violence at the hands of those she should be able to trust. She sees the spirits that surround her, and the immense power that dwarfs all of us. When she becomes pregnant, she must navigate all of this." -- cover description.
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The story of a young girl's life in Nunavut, full of spirits and mystical wildlife, physicality, darkness and abuse. I liked all the descriptive parts about life in these northern parts of Canada, the arctic tundra, the midnight sun, the animal world, people's habits, stories. The lemmings that burrow into her hair, the Northern Lights tingling in her belly, everything is very visceral. But the style being more poetry than prose, and often very segmented, or lost in dreams and visions, made it hard for me to get into this. I appreciated it more than I enjoyed most parts of it. Only late into it, when it reaches the pregnancy, the novel hit a stride for me, as it channelled its focus. The sexual abuse and too-early sexuality are very raw and require trigger warnings. There's a moment when I thought it found an empowering ending to that arc, yet then it undid itself again, which felt more honest yet tragic.
3.5
