Noopiming

The Anishinaabemowin phrase behind the title translates to "in the bush." The author chose it in deliberate reply to Susanna Moodie's 1852 memoir Roughing It in the Bush, written by an English Canadian settler. The book returns to the same landscape Moodie wrote about, and it offers a corrective to her prejudiced portrayal of the Mississauga Nishnaabeg. Its form is fluid, moving across genres rather than settling into one.

The novel's characters include Sabe, a giant reflecting on the rewards and difficulties of newly regained sobriety, and Bougie Kwe, whose Zen garden pond has been taken over by raccoons treating it as a private urban spa. Migrating geese argue for flying in formation as a way to escape a restless, looping mind. Ancestors, spirits, animals and people all go about the ongoing work of healing, both themselves and the separate threads of the larger web that joins them.

Rather than following a single plot, the stories collect small pieces over time and pass slowly between the viewpoints of different characters. The result is a densely built world that asks for patience and careful listening, and that treats meaning as something gathered through close attention and relationship.

The author, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer and scholar.