“We are always restless, carrying the dreams of children and the elderly, the tired and sick, the poor, the wounded. The removed.”

I’m definitely still processing my thoughts after just finishing, but what a beautiful story that left me asking myself if I would be able to forgive the murderer of a loved one.

Cherokee legend and myths woven with history and grief as each Echota family member handles their own trauma after the death of brother and son, Ray-Ray.

There was so much emotion that still lingered, 15 years after his passing. From Ray-Ray’s Dad with Alzheimer’s to the brother who turns to drugs, and a Mother who is battling anxiety and depression in the aftermath, and I could feel their sadness and coping mechanisms as they battle their own demons.

*many thanks to Ecco Books and Netgalley for the gifted copy

In my search to find and read more Own Voices books, I was thrilled to not only find one, but find one about my ancestors and I am very honored to have read it.

I have been trying figure out how exactly to word this review and I still don't think I can do this fantastic book any justice. So here goes!

#bookreview
The Removed by Brandon Hobson

The Removed is a pretty fast paced story, told in multiple POV of each family member and a Cherokee Native ancestor, as well as past and present tense.

What I liked:
• I love that it is about a Cherokee family, myths and history of Cherokee people.
•The inclusion of each family member and that each had their own section/chapter.
• I just kept wanting to read and read this book.
• I absolutely love multiple POV stories because it allows you to see both (or more) sides to a problem at hand.


Favorite character:
Ernest.. I don't know how to say why without spoilers, so I won't..

Some parts were emotionally difficult for me to read because of the Alzheimer's Disease parts. I felt The Removed to be a very touching, tough and heartfelt book steeped in myth/lore and history or the Cherokee people. I loved learning about some of the Cherokee myths and history, it was very enlightening.


TW:
Death
Death of a child
Drug addiction and abuse
Racism/racial injustice
gun violence
police brutality/murder
physical violence
Gaslighting

Thank you so much to Netgalley, Ecco and Brandon Hobson for the opportunity to read this great book. All opinions are my own.

Pub date: February 16, 2021
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#TheRemoved #BrandonHobson #Netgalley #NativeMyth #NativeHistory #indigenous #indigenousbooks #indigenousauthor #indigenousreviewer #bookreviewer

Maria and Ernest, a cherokee couple from Quah, Oklahoma, are fostering a 12 years old cherokee boy. Fifteen years earlier their son Ray-Ray was shot in the chest by a police officer after what seemed to be an altercation with two other men. Every year, the Echota family reunites to honor Ray- Ray with a ritual campfire.

The youngest son of the couple (Edgar) is living in New Mexico. He is an addict that refuses to seek help. He starts his own trip to the Darkening Land, the place where the souls go according to a cherokee legend. Sonja, their daughter is obsessed with a man that she hardly knows and turns out to be pretty different from what she imagined. The parents, are not sure if they will be able to reunite the family for this year's campfire.
When the foster boy arrives, Maria and Ernest can't help to be deeply moved by the similarities between him and the disappeared Ray Ray. Ernest, who suffers from Alzheimer's, starts to recover his memories. But he is also convinced that the Great Spirit sent their son back to them in another form. Soon enough, he is not the only one who believes that Ray- Ray is back, in some way or another.

The story is told by multiple narrators, so we have many storylines in parallel to the main plot, full of magic and beautiful legends about grief, anger and the supernatural.
The book is deeply moving and beautifully written. The language feels very lyrical.

I would highly recommend it.

This book is great! Would definitely recommend. Thanks so much to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

Forgiveness and family - all told within a week from different characters in the book. This book about a Cherokee family was gut wrenching and beautiful - inspiring me to read more about the culture and history. Gorgeous and captivating and one I won't forget. The Removed deserves all of the stars - bravo to Brandon Hobson.

Thank you to NetGalley, Ecco, and Mr Hobson for this ARC. I'm grateful.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC. The opinions expressed herein are mine alone and may not reflect the views of the author, publisher, or distributor.

Brandon Hobson wrote a book that is less than 300 pages, but has enough content and meaning to unpack that you could teach half a unit on this book by itself. The Removed killed me. But it healed me too.

I don’t want to get into specifics, because now that I’ve finished it, this book needs to be experienced going in blind. The blurb gives you as much as I want to give you, just enough to prepare you for the hardness of the subject matter. Brandon Hobson does the rest.

At once heartbreaking and sublime, Hobson’s prose and characters force you to come back and finish the story. I was about a third of the way through and had considered DNF-ing this, but I’m SO glad that I didn’t. I can’t place my finger on where--maybe the halfway mark--something hooked me again, and I had to know how everything would turn out. What started out as confusion and frustration became sudden epiphany and perfect sense when the climax dropped me into falling action. All the questions I’d had got wrapped up and answered, and I’m still feeling the squeeze in my heart more than twelve hours after finishing the last sentence.

What a beautiful little book. Current, horrible, sad, healing. I hate this book for making me love it so much.

The Removed by Brandon Hobson follows a family as they live with the grief of losing their brother/son in a police shooting. The book takes place over a one week period, many years after the murder, as each family member moves through the world and carries the weight of that loss. I found it to be a heartbreaking, reflective storytelling experience. It’s told in multiple perspectives, including a historical perspective from a character who lived right before the Trail of Tears. I really enjoyed how the historical character connected and wove into the larger story, I was curious how it would fit in and I loved how it played into the narrative. I also liked how the book used metaphor and symbolism. I’m not always super tuned into what is and isn’t a metaphor, so I’m sure I’m just scratching the surface of it... but I like what I was able to catch.

It’s a shorter book, at less than 300 pages, which I appreciated in many ways. It made it really impactful and because it took place over one week it very much felt like a slice of life story. We glimpsed a singular moment in time in the characters’ lives and although it didn’t wrap up their stories by the end it was ok. It gave the sense that their lives keep going, they still have problems they’re working through and resolving for themselves. It left me with a lot to think about.

CW: drug use, addiction, grief, police shooting, Alzheimer’s, foster care, assault, alcohol, racism, slurs, trail of tears

What a stunning book! I had no expectations going into it and I'm glad I didn't; it allowed me to be fully immersed in the story. And what a story it is. The Removed depicts the Echota family's grief and memory 15 years after their middle child, Ray-Ray, was murdered in a police shooting. Each of the four first-person points of view (Maria, the mother; Sonja, the older sister; Edgar, the younger brother; and Tsala, an ancestor killed in the Trail of Tears), adds a dimension to the story. Hobson's seamless writing makes connections between a modern Cherokee family and the horrors their ancestors endured on the Trail of Tears. Magical realism and Cherokee folklore play huge roles in this story; I loved the theme of storytelling woven throughout. This book was sad, but with moments of joy, as the journey of grief often is. It's about loss but also about life, and being.

#TheRemoved #NetGalley #ecco

The Removed, by Brandon Hobson, is a rainy day in late autumn in the form of a novel. The mood of the book is melancholy, an extended consideration of what is left of a family after the terrible and unnecessary death of a child. The Echota family lost the capacity for hope and wonder when their son and brother was murdered. Racism was the root cause of the death, but the family had already been made to suffer in many other ways because they were Cherokee.

What is left of resilience in the Echotas is attributable to what is left of their Cherokee culture, but it isn’t enough to slow their slide into entropy, until need for a short-term foster brings a new young boy into their care. Whether he is their son reincarnated or not, he brings liveliness back to the family. Temporarily at least, he brings a touch of Spring into their lives.

The Removed is smoothly written, but not a book to read if you are already depressed. I was not sure I was going to be able to continue to the end, and though I did, I will be haunted by the Echotas for a long time.

There aren’t enough novels out there written from a Native American perspective. I try to read them whenever I do come across them, but I have yet to find one that I truly love. I was hoping that The Removed would finally break that cycle and be something that resonated deeply enough for me to add it to my list of favorites. After all, this book was written by a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and, while I’m not an enlisted member, I’m part Cherokee and have always been fascinated by and wanted to learn more about that portion of my heritage. Unfortunately, while I love the premise and the inclusion of Cherokee mythology and some of the lore surrounding the Trail of Tears, something about this book just didn’t click with me.

There are four main perspectives, and each of them is told in the first person. For some reason, this writing decision made it harder for me to connect with the characters, though it should have done the opposite. And while I understand that everyone handles grief differently, the decisions two of these characters made didn’t make any sense to me, which made them even more difficult for me to empathize with. I also found the prose itself very stilted, with no natural rhythm to the writing, which was another reason I had a difficult time connecting with the story. This doesn’t mean that the writing was bad. It just means that the style Hobson utilizes doesn’t resonate with me.

I love the idea of this book. I love the mythology, and the cultural historical context. But unfortunately, this book just wasn’t for me. However, I think there are a lot of people out there who are going to love this book, and I’m interested to see what others think.

Thank you Netgalley for this ARC of The Removed by Brandon Hobson.

Wow, what a unique and lovely read! Admittedly, I do love a dark family drama, which this definitely was, but without any salaciousness.

The Echota's have never really been okay since losing their son and brother Ray-Ray to a racist police shooting. All of them slowly growing apart as they deal with the grief and trauma, while also rebuilding their lives. One copes by using drugs, one turns to a toxic relationship, and one helps to tend to her husband who is suffering from Alzheimer's. But when they all hit either a high, or low, they are able to find their way back to each other, and the memory of Ray Ray.

The writing was very interesting. One one hand it was very quiet and introspective. But then on the other it was almost silly in how unbelievable it was, especially the parts about Wyatt, the foster child that comes to visit. However, I'm choosing to interpret that as almost a symbol of what the couple needed in order to heal and move on, instead of a social prodigy. Either way, I got a lot out of this story.

This book focuses on the Echota family, and the way each family member experiences grief and is living their lives 15 years after Ray-Ray, their 15 year old son/brother was shot and killed by a police officer.

I had really high expectations for this book going in. It sounded extremely timely and like it would really be something I could connect with. Every adult has experienced grief at some point in their lives, and I was interested to see the way each family member handled the loss of Ray-Ray. However, I did not necessarily feel a connection to any of them. Maria, the mother and matriarch of the family, was the one for whom I had the most empathy. I felt sad for her and all that she endured. With one child gone, another addicted to drugs, and a husband suffering from Alzheimer's, she was surely dealing with a lot. I also liked Wyatt, but wish I had been given more of his story.

However, I found a lot of the book to be far-fetched and so strange that I expected certain storylines to be revealed as a dream or fantasy world. There were things that made no sense in a realistic world, and they were never explained in a way that was satisfactory to me.

And as much as I didn't connect with the story, I do actually think it should've been longer. I think that would've allowed the storylines to be more fleshed out and given the reader a better understanding and more complete picture of each character. It felt like so much was crammed into each person's story, but none of it really went any deeper than the surface.

While I liked the idea of interspersing Native American folklore into the story, I didn't feel like it was executed well. I actually found those chapters to be disconnected from the rest of the story. They almost seemed like "filler" and I didn't feel as if they tied into the overall plot of the book very well. I don't know if it just went over my head or if others will feel the same way.

Overall, I felt that the author tried to add in too many plot points without enough depth. It tried to cover a lot of important topics, but didn't give any of them enough exploration to be worthwhile. I also think that having Ray-Ray having been killed by a police officer served no real purpose in the story. He literally could have died any other way and the rest of the story could've been kept largely the same. There was one plot point in Sonja (the daughter's) story, and one small encounter at the end of the book that tied into that part of the plot, but otherwise, it didn't really serve any purpose.

That all being said, I am sure that some people will love this book. It was a fairly quick read, and I did like that the chapters were short and we got to see things from each family member's viewpoint. I am admittedly not a very abstract reader, and too much of it was unrealistic for me to enjoy the book.

I’m not going to be able to forget this book… It’s beautiful.

The Removed by Brandon Hobson is a story of grief, of family, of love, and of history. Every year on September 6th the Echota family marks both the day their eldest son Ray-Ray died, and the national Cherokee holiday with a bonfire and a meal together. Ray-Ray died 15 years earlier by police shooting, and since that day the family has dealt with their grief in different ways. Maria, the mother, journals and reads stories to children, and tries to keep her family together, while watching her husband deal with the onset of Alzheimers that has caused memory loss and confusion. Sonja, their eldest child, lives in solitude, obsessing over men a lot younger than her who always disappoint her, and Edgar, the youngest son has fallen into a life of drugs in order to separate himself from his grief and guilt.

The characters, as well as another, the spirit Tsala, narrate their own stories in the days leading up to the annual bonfire. Maria welcomes the temporary placement of a foster child named Wyatt in their home, amazed by how he seems to channel the spirit of Ray-Ray, and helps Ernest in ways that no medication has been able to. Sonja talks of her obsession with Vin, and of her solitude, Edgar of his descent into darkness and how he climbs out through it, and Tsala of the brutality of the Trail of Tears.

The narrative is beautiful, weaving reality and dream together, where Cherokee spirits and folklore are intimately entwined with the reality of the present day. There are so many connections within the narratives, and while the family seems to manage their grief in different, separate ways, they are all held together by communal trauma and healing. I don’t actually think my review can do justice to just how special and important this story is.

(Side note: anyone who references Bauhaus is a hero in my world).

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

An ambitious premise. A Cherokee family’s evolution following the wrongful murder of one of their own partnered with Cherokee mythology steeped in the tragedy of the Trail of Tears.

The one thing this author clearly conveys in this book: grief has the potential to shift a foundation. The Echotas have been gravely impacted by Ray-Ray’s death. Each member of the family is devastatingly stunted at the moment of the tragedy. The manner in which grief is differently manifested in each person felt real and heartbreaking.

What worked best to me was the story of Tsala and the Cherokee folklore. I enjoyed the lessons of their history mixed with superstition and mythology.

Regrettably, the potential for the Cherokee allegory to positively impact the story, especially through Maria and Ernest, becomes muddled in Edgar’s drug use. There were parts of the story when the Cherokee mythology gave a magical component to their lives. But then Edgar’s addiction and drug use created a weird fantasy world where you constantly questioned if what was happening was real or if he was high. I felt like his situation detracted from the overall potential in the folklore. At one point as the story transitioned between Edgar’s unstable situation to Cherokee mythology, I had the feel that I had just stepped into the Twilight Zone. While the synopsis claims to seemlessly blend real and spiritual, I found the two to be very garbled and incoherent.

I went into this book with high hopes. It has received much acclaim, and I truly enjoy reading ownvoices literature. But this one missed the mark for me. Ultimately, this book suffered from too many disjoined plot lines and a muddled mix of the real and spiritual.

Many thanks to Brandon Hobson, Ecco, and NetGalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I will absolutely require my students to read this book. I loved everything about it. I would easily give it 5 stars. I appreciate how the author presented the idea of grief - how people handle it differently and how there's no right or wrong.

I went back and forth on giving this a 4 versus a 5. I even thought, I’m sure Brandon (Um, you dropped a Joy Division reference sir, I think we’re first name friends now) would understand my 4.5. But, I thought about why I wanted a 5 and why I wanted a 4.

A 5 is going to get you pondering and thinking long after finishing. And that’s what exactly is happening. Its literally happening right now. It’s a “I need someone to read this too... now” just so I can feel comforted in that this story is being past on. That exciting discussion happen. Or, even a non verbal nod that I know you felt the power of this book.

Once again, an author manages to cover multiple topics: family, grief, home, and injustice ... and the power of storytelling.

Maybe I’m elevating this book too much? Perhaps. Maybe it’s because my ancestors are Apache and I loved playing in the tee-pee at the corner of my grandparents land? I remember. I forgot. But, I remember. I love sitting in it and was sure I’d meet the owners any moment... now, I know I have.

“I saw visions of the dying before I understood what it means to die.” - this line gutted me. it’s a reference, in part, to Cherokee people seeing other Cherokee People on the Trail of Tears, and the knowing that came.

The Removed is a moving novel that weaves together storytelling, Cherokee history, family narratives, all along the way wresting with what justice looks like. Hobson also explores how those we lose through death continue to show up for us, through various forms, and through other living beings. reading this novel is important.

i will say that while reading this, i had a weird feeling. it’s sort of mysterious, dark, and just like nothing i’ve read before. i’d also recommend reading it 1-3 sessions, or you might miss some of the connections weaved throughout.

thank you to #netgalley and #HarperCollinsPublishers for an advanced copy of #TheRemoved 🖤

The Removed shook me and shocked me, not least because of the way the story snuck up on me when I wasn't paying attention. Told through four different perspectives, the novel focuses on the Echota family, whose lives are snagged and tangled around the painful memory of Ray Ray Echota's tragic death at fifteen. Though the hole where he should be threatens to swallow them, it also offers a path to connection with their Cherokee ancestors, whose stories and mythology increasingly shape the action of the novel.

I will admit that the first half of this book didn't fully grab me. Though the stories of each character are distinct, they each take on an observational tone that at first made it difficult to differentiate between their personalities. Soon, though, the spareness of the prose begins to feel closer to something mythic; at the same time that the Echota family's personal and cultural memories sharpen into focus, their reality edges closer to fantasy. Nothing feels totally real, so anything seems possible.

tl;dr: Beautiful, surprising, worth reading. (Thank you to Netgalley and Ecco for the ARC!)

*Disclaimer* I received a complimentary advanced copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, in exchange for a fair review.

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This book was unlike any other book I’ve read before. Not all authors can effectively do the structure of having each chapter come from another main character’s point of view, but Hobson did it well. I appreciated the dates that accompanied them, though when reading it felt like it was a much longer period of time.

It was heartfelt in some parts, mystical in others, and the interconnectedness was heartbreaking in the most intimate of ways. It doesn’t necessarily need a sequel, but I would have loved at least a couple more chapters to really pull everything together – even if just done from the POV of Tsala and the father.

This story is about a Cherokee family in Oklahoma, who fifteen yrs prior, lost their oldest son Ray-Ray when he was killed unjustly by a police officer.
The parents and two remaining adult children are planning to come together for a yearly bonfire where they share memories of him.
We see the grief of each family member, and how their lives have been since Ray-Ray’s death.
Quite a hauntingly beautiful book!



Thank you to Netgalley and Ecco for this ARC!