Red Dove, Listen to the Wind by Sonia Antaki is a needed middle grade novel about the ways Native Americans are treated. It shows the 13 year old's perspective of how things unfold, and her confusion as she strives to obey her ancestors and family, but is pulled away from her heritage.

The novel follows Red Dove's story as she is sent to a Catholic school for girls. She's separated from her brother and she's left to figure out the new world by herself. She has help along the way, but the main idea is that she always has the help of her ancestors, just like her grandfather said.

There are a lot of native names and those are confusing for one who's not used to them, not to mention all the objects that carry so much power and meaning for them. The writing is also at times confusing, and so is the telling of the fights and clashes between the whites and the natives.

However, for a Native American and for a white person this is a wonderful step of seeing things from a different perspective than we're used to. It's also a great way for young people of other cultures than American/ European to see themselves represented in literature.

Red Dove is 13 years old, she sees that times are changing and she must go to the white man's world to learn their ways, while staying true to her upbringing.

A coming of age tale about a girl who walks the lines between two worlds, that of her mother or that of her white father. She goes to an Indian school to learn the ways of the white people, struggling to stay true to herself.

I liked the perspective of this book and how it showed how a child going through this experience might have felt and reacted to such a situation. Relevant today, yet a historical read.

TW: Racism towards indigenous/First Nations people, light descriptions of genocide and violence, abuse of children

Disclaimer #1: I received a copy of this novel from One Elm Books in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to them and to the author for providing the copy.

Disclaimer #2: I am not of indigenous/First Nations descent so I cannot speak fully to the representation. This is not an #ownvoices book, but the author did reach out to the community for sensitivity readings.

The art style, including the cover, is so delightful! It's cute and light-hearted, despite the rather heavy material inside. I've consumed books, movies and TV shows about indigenous and First Nations people for a pretty long time; I'm not sure why I'm drawn to them when the history of colonization always puts me in a bad mood. I was curious about a more juvenile take on the subject, which was why I requested for this book.

Plot and Writing

We follow Red Dove, a rambunctious and curious mixed race child who lives with her mother, Falling Bird, and brother, Walks Alone, as they live among their Lakota people, until she is forced to go to a residential school run. Red Dove then must use everything she has, including a magical pouch gifted by her grandfather that grants her the ability to understand any language and hear people's thoughts, to escape her predicaments, find her family and discover what her destiny is. This is both a coming-of-age story and historical look at some of the most egregious moments in the treatment of First Nations people, from the residential schools to the Wounded Knee genocide. It moved around from place to place and never felt lagging or boring. It's hard to say that I enjoyed the

The writing is simple and easy, perfect for younger audiences, making this a pretty quick read. That being said, it was engaging and kept you interested in what was going to happen next!

Characters

Red Dove was a fun character to follow! She didn't shy away from what she wanted and always tried to appease her bottomless curiosity regardless of what people said to her. She was also written believably as a kid; not too weirdly wise and not too annoyingly naive. The way she matures thanks to her experiences, and recognizing the different kinds of violence against her people, was satisfying and realistic. Walks Alone, her brother, at times bothered me but their strong love for each other and their fear of the future made him more sympathetic. I worried about him alongside Red Dove! I wished we'd seen more depth of character from her Grandfather, who essentially was just relegated to 'wise old Native man'. I thought we'd also get more from her mother but Falling Bird wasn't really there much. Still, it was well understood that the elders in Red Dove's life cared for her and didn't want to have to send her away but knew she was destined to do great things.

I appreciated how the author had a good range of characters, and didn't split up the good guys from the bad guys. There were 'good guys' who did and said questionable things like Jerusha and there are 'bad guys' who have inklings of goodness like Red Dove's father.

Conclusion

I found Red Dove, Listen to the Wind to be a fantastically magical book with a strong heroine! It does a great job explaining the plight of the indigenous people in that time period at a child's level of understanding.

My Rating: 3.5/5

A young girl of mixed race (mother is Native American, father is white) must leave her home on the reservation and work through the process of discovering who she is, and where she fits in the world.
This book is well written, and the story moves consistently forward. The characters are developed fully, so that you feel a connection to them even if you cannot necessarily relate to the specific circumstances. It is an engrossing story, and I felt immersed in the narrative. After reading, I passed this book along to my 10 year old daughter. I think it is important for children to read stories like this, to understand how different times affected people, and how those people worked through their difficulties.

Thank you to NetGalley for the free advance copy in return for my honest review.

I need to start by saying that I didn't actually finish this book. I got about a third of the way through and just couldn't take it anymore. While I appreciate the topic as one that is not often approached in a book meant for kids (hence the two stars), I found the book itself extremely odd. It seemed at the beginning to be aiming for a certain level of realism, as established by the time period and the references to various battles. I had a hard time figuring out exactly how old Red Dove is supposed to be, although I think at one point it says she is 13. Her thoughts and actions make her seem like a much younger character. The book is written very sparsely, with few descriptions of anything, which made it difficult for me to feel like I could picture the world that she lived it. For a book about the trauma of being taken from home, some feeling for what home was like would have made me care more about it. From all the people scolding her for being different and not respecting the rules, it almost seemed like she should be happy to go.

For a book that is so short on descriptions, it seemed to take forever for the plot to advance anywhere. There was so much talking that everything just seemed to grind to a halt anytime someone said something. I can't really imagine most kids wanting to sit through all of the dialogue and Red Dove's thoughts.

I think the book really lost me when Red Dove's grandfather gives her the magic pouch. The book felt like it should be more realistic historical fiction, so when she could suddenly touch a pouch and understand English and even read people's thoughts, I was surprised. It was an interesting choice that didn't really help the narrative. In my opinion it actually hurt it. If the author was trying to show how hard it was for Native American children to be put in these kinds of schools, she should have emphasized how lost they would have been, put in a situation where they not only didn't know the customs, but couldn't understand the language. By having Red Dove easily be able to communicate with everybody around her, her experience is missing that sense of being totally lost that I'm sure many kids must have felt at the time.

Overall, I give it points for having an interesting subject, but I wouldn't recommend it.

I have a long backlog of ARC books that I'm determined to read and review and because of that I have gotten much more selective about the books I request. This is a long way of saying that I really hoped to like this book. I've had some great reading with other indigenous people children's books and so held this one to a high standard as well. Unfortunately this book just doesn't have quite the energy it needs to hold a young reader's attention.

Red Dove is a thirteen year old girl who lives with her Lakota family though her father was a white man who abandoned her. The winters have been harsh and as the Lakota look at another very lean winter Red Dove must make a difficult decision - stay with her Lakota family and be a part of the starving and suffering or live in the white world - a world that is foreign and frightening to her.

This is a tough coming of age story and reflects one that many Native children (and adults) were often forced to make. And the whites who were overseeing the care of Native Americans were often harsh and cruel (as depicted here in the character of Sister Agatha). The history here is fantastic and this is important for children - not just of Native descent, but for all children - to learn about.

My issue here is with the presentation. I found the book to be so evenly paced, with so much reflection on Red Dove's part, that it was getting boring and dull to read. The last quarter (perhaps a little less) there suddenly was some energy to the story and I was finally allowed to be engaged with the characters and the action and I enjoyed the last section quite a bit. But I wonder if young readers will make it that far if they aren't brought in to the story a little sooner, instead of being presented with so much history and background.

I recommend this book for what it is saying, but in this age of low attention span and instant gratification, I wonder how many younger readers will take the time to absorb this.

Looking for a good book? Red Dove, Listen to the Wind by Sonia Antaki is a valuable story for young readers but some readers may struggle to stay engaged.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

Red Dove, Listen to the Wind is a lyrical but tough book to digest because of the topic it covers. A half-white/half Lakota girl and her brother are forced to attend school to be stripped of their way of life and assimilated into “proper” American children. They’re separated upon reaching the school, Red Dove with the nuns and other young girls, and her brother with the priests. They are expected to only speak English, dress as Americans, pray to the Christian God, and their hair must be cut to the shoulders, just to name a few of the eye-opening rules forced on the children.

It’s disgusting how our ancestors treated the Native Americans and though this book was beautifully written, it was really hard to read the passages where Red Dove and other Native Americans were subjected to abuse because of her skin color and heritage. On the contrary, I loved how some white characters were redeemed at the end, and the author made sure to explain their journey and why they changed.

The only con which dropped my rating was how I didn’t care for the magically pouch that Red Dove’s grandfather gave her. The pouch gave her visions and let her communicate with her grandfather despite the miles between them. I wish it had been left out so the story seemed more real.

Thank you NetGalley for giving me the chance to read this book.

Red Dove is a Lakota girl living in the year 1890. She lives with her family – mother, grandfather, and brother. They don’t live on a reservation, but are visited by traders and other people. One day, a man and woman visit, and the woman insists that Red Dove must go to school. Red Dove is given a choice, which is more than many other Lakota children in that era got.

During this time period, many children were taken from their families and sent to boarding schools, some never to see their families again. At the boarding schools, their culture was taken, they were forbidden to speak their language, and were punished if they did. It was a traumatic experience for those children and has had consequences that are still being felt by their descendants today.

In Red Dove’s case, she decides to go, along with her brother. The next time the woman comes by, Red Dove and her brother ride with her to the school, where they are left with the nuns. Before she leaves her family, Red Dove is given a special pouch by her grandfather. She keeps it with her throughout the boarding school experience and it helps her understand people, even when they speak to her in English, which she is just learning. The pouch gives her a special way to understand other people and she uses it to help other kids at the school. Some of the nuns are not kind to the children, and one is downright cruel. This one especially seems to have it in for Red Dove. One of the nuns is very nice to the kids, but the cruel one ends up sending her away.

Red Dove knows that she is half white and half Lakota, but she does not know her white father. This proves to be a big problem for her.

If you know your history, you know what happened at the Massacre at Wounded Knee Creek in 1890. That horrific event is told in this book. Red Dove is there at the school when wounded people are brought in for help. She learns that some members of her family were there. What will she decide to do?

This book is a great historical novel that tells of an event that is often ignored by modern history books. The story is written from the perspective of a Lakota child who is growing up during this most turbulent time. The voice of Red Dove is that of a strong female lead character. She is scared, but she is also brave enough to face the challenge of leaving home and going into the entirely new and unknown situation at the boarding school. She faces every challenge set before her and she keeps her dignity. As a role model, Red Dove is wonderful.

The book also gives a good history lesson and describes an extremely painful time in history. Many people were massacred at Wounded Knee Creek and this event has far-reaching consequences for everyone. Women, children, and elders were all killed in the massacre. To this day, their descendants still live with the memories and the losses suffered that day. Having a story set in that time period offers a chance for modern readers to learn about this pivotal event and to understand how it affected so many.

The ending of the story was well-done and all loose ends are taken care of. But, the reader also has things to think about. The story will open many points for classroom discussion. As such, this would make a great novel to use as a class reading assignment. There is a lot of potential for some meaningful discussions based on this story and the events it portrays.

As a stand-alone novel, it is also just a great read. It’s a powerful story with a good message and plenty of historical facts. I highly recommend this novel.

An ambitious and beautifully organized and collected narrative and images to accompany them. A must for young children and young children's classrooms.

I found this an interesting and touching read.
I think it would be lovely for children.
I did find the Native Names a little confusing.
I voluntarily read and reviewed this book, all thoughts a opinions are my own.

A great story of believing in one's self and staying true to one's self. A great read! Perfect for readers looking for a strong, brave female character as well as for readers looking for historical fiction.

I wasn't sure what to expect, but I enjoyed reading this. An interesting story with fun characters. Well written.

Red Dove, Listen to the Wind by Sonia Antaki is the story about a young Lakota girl sent to live at a boarding school far from her home. At the school she is forbidden to practice her way of life in order to someday assimilate into society. [SPOILER ALERT] Refusing to conform, Red Dove hesitantly relies on a pouch given by her grandfather. With the pouch she seems to take on a sort of a super power of empathy and the ability to understand other languages. In turn, the pouch when touched by someone else can also bring about a certain emotional reaction or vision. Refusing to abandon her beliefs Red Dove uses her experience from the boarding school and the tragedy at Wounded Knee to help others. With the help of her grandfather she realizes that the most ordinary gifts she possesses is what will give her courage and strength to help others find happiness.

Although a historical fiction with some elements of fantasy, the story is also about adversity-no matter your skin color, adventure, belonging and holding on to identity.

Thank you to One Elm Books and Netgalley, for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

*I will be waiting to post my review online until closer to the book's publication date. I will also remove all quotations used in this review. I am only using quotations in this review for the publishers to know what I am referring to. I will not use or post these quotations anywhere else.*

This book was confusing to me. What I thought would be historical fiction turned out to have elements of fantasy, which when introduced to the story took me out of the experience (i.e. the pouch Red Dove's grandfather gives to her that allows her to know what other people are thinking, feeling, and translates languages for her). It is true I do not know if powers like these were common or not in that culture, but it seems very far-fetched that all Red Dove has to do is touch a pouch, and then she understands another language perfectly. Furthermore, we are told in the blurb that Red Dove is thirteen, but when the story begins she seems like a much younger character, possibly aged nine. It is not until halfway through the story that I believe based on her thoughts and actions that she is at least thirteen years old. There are also unnecessary point-of-view switches, from third person to first person and back again, multiple times. For example, "Red Dove reached for the tiny scrap of meat and bit down . . . . She caught the look of approval on her mother's face. We both know it will be licked up by ravenous animals, but after all that's happened today, I don't want to break any more traditions. Red Dove followed her mother to her grandfather's tepee." The author should choose one point of view and stick with it, because the switches are distracting.

What I liked about the story was the message. A young girl of mixed race trying to find her place in the world because she feels as if she doesn't belong to one group or the other is very relevant. I like that she intends to find her happiness and her place by helping others. The illustrations were beautiful and added to the story. Overall, I thought the bones of this book were great, but the execution needs some cleaning up. If a newer ARC comes out with any changes, I would be happy to read and review again.

3.75
This book was a little slow for me and a little hard to get into. But I'm so glad I did and got to read about such a strong little girl who is very much a hero in her own right. I can see this becoming a classroom read and it's story is something that can be discussed for hours on end. The novel has such a good balence of culture and history, in that events like this did occur and it is important for people to read stories from different points of view. It's a novel that can make young readers think and form opinions and I hope this book gets the recognition it deserves.

*Book received through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review*

This was a book that hit a lot of hight points on my list. It's diverse, it's culturally accurate, it's historically accurate, and it's been reviewed by sensitivity readers who actually know what to look for. It's age-appropriate for the juvenile/middle grade fiction category and is also written really well. The illustrations were also very nice and added to the story in such a positive way.

Not to be confused with The Red Dove by Gerry Hillier or The Red Dove by Derek Lambert, this Red Dove (illustrated by Andrew Bosley and subtitled "Listen to the Wind") tells the story of a young Lakota Sioux girl named Red Dove, who lives on a reservation in the Dakota Territory in the early 1890s. She is a child of a white Irish father and an American Indian mother. The blurb tells us that food is scarce, yet the opening few paragraphs detail a hunting trip during which the girl and her half-brother Walks Alone are looking at a whole posse of turkeys, one of which Red Dove brings down with an arrow even though women are not supposed to hunt so we're told.

One issue I had with this book was that it is supposed to be about a strong female of the Lakota Sioux, but if felt like an ordinary story, and there were no references anywhere to any other Sioux women except for the main character's mother. There have been scores of strong American Indian women, including tribal leaders, who lived around or before the time this story takes place, yet we hear of none of them. For example, the Battle of the Little Big Horn, where Custer led a bunch of the Seventh cavalry foolishly to their deaths, is mentioned in this story more than once, yet none of the female Lakota who fought in t hat battle get a mention, and there were at least three of them: Minnie Hollow Wood, Moving Robe Woman (a Hunkpapa Sioux who is credited in some accounts with dispatching Custer), or One Who Walks With the Stars (an Oglala Sioux woman). The leader known in the west as 'Crazy Horse' is mentioned, but his wife, Black Shawl, never gets a word. It's like, despite this novel being about a Sioux woman, Indian women are excluded from the story. It made no sense to me.

Note that Lakota women were not the only ones who fought in battles. There were other American Indian women of other tribes who also fought at Little Bighorn or elsewhere. These women were not shrinking violets. They were tough and self sufficient, and very strong. Names that come to mind are Buffalo Calf Road Woman, a Cheyenne woman whose rescue of her brother at the Battle of the Rosebud was instrumental in turning the tide in the Indian's favor. She also fought alongside her husband at Little Bighorn, and is credited with knocking Custer from his horse. Pretty Nose was a female Arapaho war chief who fought at Little Bighorn.

So anyway, there clearly was no scarcity of food if there are so many turkeys to be had, but these two kids are nevertheless sent off with strangers to a Catholic missionary school where they're treated brutally. Now I get that American Indians have been - and in far too many cases still are - treated appallingly, but the problem I had with this book is that it's relentless in its brutality, with no leavening whatsoever, and it's also unrealistic. It's unrealistic in that this girl was of an age which back then would have been considered 'ripe for the plucking' by the unscrupulous and brutal white men with whom she comes into contact, yet she is never once sexually assaulted or even threatened by it.

Naturally you don't want those horrific details in a middle-grade book, but to not even hint at what a precarious position a girl like her would have been in seemed inauthentic to me when other forms of violence against her were depicted without reserve. The fact is that (according to a 2010 Department of Justice study) over four out of five American Indian and Alaskan Native women have experienced violence, over half have experienced sexual violence and of those, almost all of them experienced it at the hands of a non-tribal member.

The truth is that Native Americans are more than twice as likely to experience sexual assault and rape than any other ethnic group in the United States, and this is today in our supposedly more enlightened times. To avoid this topic in a book set back when there were neither rules nor any sort of moral compass to enlighten and dissuade men from abusing American Indians is a grave failure to face the facts. It's disingenuous and the Sioux women deserve better. The author isn't native American, and while I don't consider that a disqualification by any means, I have to wonder if she perhaps she did not think this idea properly through.

The novel seemed to drag for me, made worse by the never-ending brutality, and while Red Dove is shown as escaping at one point from the Catholic school she fails to get very far before being captured. After that, she suffers the 'white savior' trope in which a white kid helps her out, so she's not really demonstrating "that her greatest power comes from within herself" as the blurb promises.

I think her agency is further diluted by the introduction of a ridiculous level of the supernatural. For me this cheapened Red Dove's story considerably, and made her look like she was mentally unstable. I think a novel without the supernatural, where the girl was shown to have delivered herself from evil as it were, but without need for spirits, and men, including her grandfather, telling her what to do, would have made for a much stronger story. The book also mentions conscription at one point in the narrative, but there was no such thing between the end of the civil war and the start of World War One in the USA to my knowledge.

This book was evidently designed as a print book with no thought given to the ebook version, so the use of drop caps, which I personally do not like, managed to screw-up the layout of the book after it went through Amazon's crappy Kindle conversion process which will mangle your book if it's anything more ambitious than plain vanilla. On more than one occasion, the drop-cap was removed from the start of the first sentence in a chapter and deposited at the start of the second line, so at one point, for example, I read, “he sun sank low behind the hills, the air carried a chill, Tand the sky shimmered from gold to pink.” Here you can see that the 'T' that should gave begun the sentence is appended instead to another word that presumably started the next line in the print version. That line, beginning with ‘Tand’ was a half line below the rest of the text as well.

Many parts of the novel seemed like they had hard 'carriage returns' built into the text, so while some screens had the text run from one side to other as is normal, other screens had the text ending mid-screen and dropping to the next line. It made for a scrappy-looking book and both author and publisher need to take responsibility for checking these things. I personally refuse to publish with Amazon, but if you're going to do that, you need to watch them like a hawk because they will ruin your book's layout if they're not watched like a hawk, as this example proved handsomely in its ugliness.

So all these things together made for a very unsatisfying read for me, and shortly after the white savior came riding to the rescue, I gave up on it. That was around eighty percent, when Red Dove began having out of the body experiences. Sorry but this as not for me and while I wish the author all the best in her career, I cannot commend this as a worthy read.

Great historical fiction that will resonate with young readers. The courage of Red Dove is inspiring!

A very visual tale about a 13 year old girl named Red Dove who has to choose between leaving her family on a reservation to seek a better life for herself and live her wish to go to school or stay and watch them go through difficulties to make ends meet.

She's of mixed heritage, and has such a curiosity for life and is sad to leave her family but eager to get going on her quest.

There are many different characters in this book and the details and visual are plentiful. There's a quick yet relaxed pace in the book and in the creation of all the characters. Red Dove Listen to the Wind is engrossing, detailed sad humbling and eyeopening.

I'm very interested in different cultures and think so many people of all generations could learn a lot from this book.

Thanks to Sonia Antaki, Andrew Bosley and publisher for my ARC in exchange for an honest and voluntary review. 4 stars as the story is excellent as are the beautiful illustrations. I'd love more of those..