We’re back
in-person!
Does a good mystery capture your interest? After you have read this month's choice, join us for a great discussion. Each month we will read a new title from the mystery genre. New members are always welcome.
Registration required.
In
September, we are discussing Highway of Tears by Jessica
McDiarmd. This title is available as an ebook or audiobook from DownloadLibrary.
Weather permitting, the book club will be meeting in the Sheriff John Motz Courtyard.
An explosive examination of the missing and murdered Indigenous women of Highway 16, and a searing indictment of the society that failed them. For decades, women--overwhelmingly from Indigenous backgrounds--have gone missing or been found murdered along an isolated stretch of highway in northwestern B.C. The highway is called the Highway of Tears by locals, and it has come to symbolize a national crisis.
In Highway of Tears, Jessica McDiarmid meticulously explores the effect these tragedies have had on communities in the region, and how systemic racism and indifference towards Indigenous lives have created a culture of "over-policing and under-protection," simultaneously hampering justice while endangering young Indigenous women.
Highway
of Tears will offer an
intimate, first-hand look at the communities along Highway 16 and the families of the victims, as well as examine
the historically fraught social and cultural tensions between settler and
Indigenous peoples that underlie life in the region. Finally, it will link
these cases with others found across Canada--estimated to number over
1,200--contextualizing them within a broader examination of the undervaluing of Indigenous lives in the
country and of our
ongoing failure to provide justice for the missing and murdered.