Three Day Road
Ratings2
Average rating4.5
It is 1919, and Niska, the last Oji-Cree medicine woman to live off the land, has received word that one of the two boys she grudgingly saw off to war has returned. She leaves her home in the bush of Northern Ontario to retrieve him, only to discover that the one she expected is actually the other.Xavier Bird, her sole living relation, gravely wounded and addicted to the army's morphine, hovers somewhere between the living world and that of the dead. As Niska paddles him the three days home, she realizes that all she can offer in her attempt to keep him alive is her words, the stories of her life.In turn, Xavier relates the horrifying years of war in Europe: he and his best friend, Elijah Whiskeyjack, prowled the battlefields of France and Belgium as snipers of enormous skill. As their reputations grew, the two young men, with their hand-sewn moccasins and extraordinary marksmanship, became both the pride and fear of their regiment as they stalked the ripe killing fields of Ypres and the Somme.But what happened to Elijah? As Niska paddles deeper into the wilderness, both she and Xavier confront the devastation that such great conflict leaves in its wake.Inspired in part by real-life World War I Ojibwa hero Francis Pegahmagabow, Three Day Road reinvents the tradition of such Great War epics as Birdsong and All Quiet on the Western Front. Beautifully written and told with unblinking focus, it is a remarkable tale, one of brutality, survival, and rebirth.
Series
Featured Series
3 primary books4 released booksBird Family Trilogy
Bird Family Trilogy is a 4-book series with 3 primary works first released in 2005 with contributions by Joseph Boyden.
Reviews
Popular Reviews
Reviews with the most likes.
Three Day Road is three intertwined stories: The framing story of a Cree woman who has traveled to the city to collect her nephew, Xavier, who has returned home from the battlefields of the first world war missing a leg and with a new addiction to morphine. As they paddle their canoe home, Niska (the aunt) relates the story of her life to Xavier, and he narrates the story of his experience as a sniper in the trenches of France* to the reader as he slips in and out of morphine-fueled dreams. The three stories being told together help strengthen one another, providing insight into each other and deepening the emotional links between them.
This was a very powerful, although dense, read. It takes a perspective on war that isn't entirely unique (“War is tragedy not only for what soldiers do to their enemy, but also because of the type of person it changes them into”), but it's a perspective that's told very strongly and, because of the Native background of the protagonists, it does have something of a unique spin on it.
*Apparently there's a factual basis to this part of the story: due to their experience as hunters, Native soldiers made for some of the top snipers in the Canadian and British forces during WWI.
A wonderfully immersive story, that pulls you into the WWI trenches with two Canadian Cree Indians and constructs a tale of ancestry and destiny, the horrors of war and the healing it requires. Xavier Bird, Elijah Whiskeyjack and their ‘auntie', medicine woman Niska, are memorable characters. The book definitely deserves all the accolades it received.
