Join us for the next meeting of the Violet Hour Book Club, a reading group devoted to classic and contemporary works of LGBTQ literature. The book we will be discussing is Daughters of the Deer (2022) by Danielle Daniel, a special selection to mark National Indigenous History Month in Canada.
Toustes sont invités·es au Violet Hour Book Club, et chacun.e est bienvenu.e à partager ses pensées sur le livre en anglais ou en français.
We will be meeting at our new venue, the Espace des Possibles Petite-Patrie (6450 Avenue Christophe Colomb, Beaubien Metro).
L’Espace des Possibles a comme mission d’offrir un lieu d’entraide, d’apprentissages et d’implication dédié à la transition sociale et écologique (la transition socio-écologique). The space is wheelchair accessible.
The space is given to us for free, but VHBC participants are welcome to make voluntary contributions to help support our mandate to create LGBTQ literary events for Montrealers.
A reminder: All VHBC titles are available at Librairie Paragraphe Bookstore (2220, McGill College Ave) and Librairie Pulp Books & Cafe (3952 Wellington St.) at 10% off.
ABOUT THE BOOK ///
In this haunting and groundbreaking historical novel, Danielle Daniel imagines the lives of women in the Algonquin territories of the 1600s, a story inspired by her family’s ancestral link to a young girl who was murdered by French settlers.
1657. Marie, a gifted healer of the Deer Clan, does not want to marry the green-eyed soldier from France who has asked for her hand. But her people are threatened by disease and starvation and need help against the Iroquois and their English allies if they are to survive. When her chief begs her to accept the white man’s proposal, she cannot refuse him, and sheds her deerskin tunic for a borrowed blue wedding dress to become Pierre’s bride.
1675. Jeanne, Marie’s oldest child, is seventeen, neither white nor Algonquin, caught between worlds. Caught by her own desires, too. Her heart belongs to a girl named Josephine, but soon her father will have to find her a husband or be forced to pay a hefty fine to the French crown. Among her mother’s people, Jeanne would have been considered blessed, her two-spirited nature a sign of special wisdom. To the settlers of New France, and even to her own father, Jeanne is unnatural, sinful—a woman to be shunned, beaten, and much worse.
With the poignant, unforgettable story of Marie and Jeanne, Danielle Daniel reaches back through the centuries to touch the very origin of the long history of violence against Indigenous women and the deliberate, equally violent disruption of First Nations cultures.
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