Winner of the 2017 Governor General's Literary Award (Young People's Literature - Text)
Winner of the 2017 Kirkus Prize
Winner of the 2018 Sunburst Award
Winner of the 2018 Amy Mathers Teen Book Award
Winner of the 2018 Burt Award for First Nations, Inuit and Métis Young Adult Literature
Just when you think you have nothing left to lose, they come for your dreams.
Humanity has nearly destroyed its world through global warming, but now an even greater evil lurks. The Indigenous people of North America are being hunted and harvested for their bone marrow, which carries the key to recovering something the rest of the population has lost: the ability to dream. In this dark world, Frenchie and his companions struggle to survive as they make their way up north to the old lands. For now, survival means staying hidden - but what they don't know is that one of them holds the secret to defeating the marrow thieves.
“In The Marrow Thieves’ dystopian Canada, irreparably marred by climate change, humanity has grown so traumatized that only Indigenous people retain the ability to dream. So the government is kidnapping them and harvesting their bone marrow in a desperate, mysterious effort to make white people’s REM cycles great again. It’s a jarring allegory for North America’s colonial past and a global future that looks more precarious every day, and one that Cherie Dimaline, a member of the Métis Nation of Ontario, gracefully unfurls in her 2017 novel. But The Marrow Thieves, a winner of the Kirkus Prize and Canada’s prestigious Governor General’s Award, isn’t just a political statement. It’s also a riveting, adventure-packed coming-of-age story whose orphaned hero, an Indigenous 16-year-old boy known as Frenchie, makes an arduous northward journey to what he and his companions hope will be relative safety, and finds community and culture in the face of violence and dehumanization.”
“Dimaline’s terrific writing is taut, energetic and confident, filled with empathy and poetry.”