#BlogTour ‘Bad Cree’ by Jessica Johns

About the book…

In this gripping debut tinged with supernatural horror, a young Cree woman’s dreams lead her on a perilous journey of self-discovery that ultimately forces her to confront the toll of a legacy of violence on her family, her community and the land they call home.

When Mackenzie wakes up with a severed crow’s head in her hands, she panics. Only moments earlier she had been fending off masses of birds in a snow-covered forest. In bed, when she blinks, the head disappears.

Night after night, Mackenzie’s dreams return her to a memory from before her sister Sabrina’s untimely death: a weekend at the family’s lakefront campsite, long obscured by a fog of guilt. But when the waking world starts closing in, too–a murder of crows stalks her every move around the city, she wakes up from a dream of drowning throwing up water, and gets threatening text messages from someone claiming to be Sabrina–Mackenzie knows this is more than she can handle alone.

Traveling north to her rural hometown in Alberta, she finds her family still steeped in the same grief that she ran away to Vancouver to escape. They welcome her back, but their shaky reunion only seems to intensify her dreams–and make them more dangerous.

What really happened that night at the lake, and what did it have to do with Sabrina’s death? Only a bad Cree would put their family at risk, but what if whatever has been calling Mackenzie home was already inside?

I was so so thrilled to be asked to join the blogtour for ‘Bad Cree’ by Jessica Johns, because, ladies and gentlemen, believe the hype , this debut novel is going to be MASSIVE. If there is any justice in the world, which I cling to the hope that there is, this will be a book topping so many 2023 must reads, as it should.

Bad Cree is a fever dream of reality versus visions which overlap in their intensity and intent, leaving Mackenzie haunted by the notion of who she really is and where she belongs.

Fleeing from her family and moving to Vancouver following the death of her kokum , her mother’s mother, she has not returned even after the death of her sister for the funeral.

Her notion of identity is so intrinsically entwined with her memories of a matriarchal, structured life with her aunties, uncles and cousins that she sees herself as a bad Cree, a person to whom gifts in the form of prophetic dreams are becoming a curse.

Is it hereditary or integral to who she is as a person and is she ascribing more to her imaginings than is actually there?

As the line between the dream world, memories and day to life begin to pull the threads of her existence to a taut and tense fabric, the pull to go back home and find out exactly why she is visioning the death of her sister is unbearable.

How and why she is bringing things from her dreams into reality is one strand of the narrative, the other is unresolved grief from inherited loss, displacement, and shaken identity. The birds amassing around her and seemingly intruding on her daily life could be menace or warning, but the text messages, purportedly from her deceased sister Sabrina are entirely another.

”Dreams can get you anywhere, but sometimes the illusion of safety is better than nothing.”

This creates such a sense of tension, misdirection and connection with Mackenzie that you feel as though you are being folded into her reality, genuinely becoming fearful for her, and urging her on towards clarity and resolution. The horror exists in the spaces between understanding and oblivion, it is deep, abiding and raw, an unforgettable tale which is both deeply personal and enlightening in the constant use of Cree language and acknowledgement of culture and traditions. It is not an expositional way in which we, the reader, are brought into the Cree community, it is described as it is lived, with a keen and aching awareness that transcends the page-

”This place wasn’t built to believe us, and white people will try to stamp out anything they don’t understand.”

And this is why Mackenzie needs to go home, exposing herself to a white, patriarchal, heteronormative society’s perspective on the power of dreams would only lead to medical model management of the symptoms-anti depressants, mood enhancers, therapy, incarceration and worse.

I loved the interplay with language, and the deep, abiding love between characters that transcends biological connections, creates a vivid and heavily physical environment reflected in the nature of these characters, juxtaposed with the motif of birds, commonly used in literature as psychopomps-messengers and carriers of the dead.

It is such a tremendous privilege to be able to bury yourself deep in a book and be transported to another version of a world so beyond our own, and that is the alchemy of writers like Jessica Johns, she traps magic in the pages of Bad Cree.

About the author…

Jessica Johns is a Nehiyaw aunty and member of Sucker Creek First Nation in Treaty 8 territory in Northern Alberta. Her writing has been published in numerous literary magazines, and her short story Bad Cree won the 2020 Writers’ Trust McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize. Her visual art has been featured at the 2022 Rhubarb Festival, grunt gallery, and at Latitude 53.

She serves on the editorial board for GUTS – An Anti-Colonial Feminist Magazine, the advisory board for the Indigenous Brilliance reading series, and also brews kombucha as the founder of kokôm kombucha.

Link-https://jessicasbjohns.com/

Twitter @jessicastellaa @ScribeUKBooks