Sarah O'Connor

“When some dies, you stop remembering them fully,” (Johns 23).

Mackenzie wakes up with a crow’s head in her hand, but moments later it disappears as if it was never there to begin with. It isn’t the first thing Mackenzie has brought back from her dreams, but it is the most troubling. Night after night Mackenzie returns to her dreams where she sees a horrifying vision of her sister Sabrina who died the year before and returns to a memory at her family’s lakefront campsite and something that may or may not have happened in the woods. When she wakes up coughing up water from almost drowning and a text message from Sabrina, Mackenzie knows it’s time to return to her family in High Prairie, Alberta. She’s welcomed back but grief still hangs heavy among them, and when the dreams continue and get more dangerous for herself and her family, Mackenzie can’t help wondering if she’s a bad Cree for bringing all of this to them.

Bad Cree has been on my list for such a long time and I’m so happy I finally got the chance to read it (thanks Rachel for letting me borrow it)! The book is a light-horror, there are certainly some chilling moments, but I’ve definitely read scarier. But Johns really excels in creating an uneasy atmosphere for her protagonist. Things are off in Mackenzie’s world, she’s being followed by crows, her dreams are unsettling, and she’s trying to go about her days like things are normal. It’s a perfect metaphor for grief, this change that overcomes a person when a loved one dies, how strange the world feels once they’re gone and this need for the world and self to go back to normal. I think it was such a realistic look at grief and that the antagonist in the novel really added to that metaphor.

I loved reading from Mackenzie’s point-of-view and meeting her family and friends. Joli was a wonderful character even though we only got to see them for a limited time, and I loved Kassidy and Tracey and how deeply everyone cared for each other. I loved Mackenzie’s mom and her Aunties and how they all banded together to help her despite their estrangement. It was a great look at familial love and provided great levity from some of the darker moments of the book. Johns has a wonderful voice, there were many quotable moments of the book and I found myself lost in the setting and able to clearly visualize exactly what was happening as I was reading.

Also, I found the short story “Bad Cree” that was the predecessor to this! An interesting read to see what stayed in and what changed to book form.

Bad Cree is a wonderful book all about how far family will go to protect the ones they love. Johns has a beautiful voice and I can’t wait to see what else she has to write!

Publication: January 10th 2023
Publisher: Harper Collins
Pages: 297 pages (Paperback)
Source: Borrowed (Thanks Rachel!)
Genre: Fiction, Horror, Mystery Indigenous
My Rating: ⛤⛤⛤⛤
Summary:

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?