What happens when you start seeing the ‘unseen’?

“You forget that any house, every house, has blind spots, and what you know is always partial. Pretty soon you see only what you are used to seeing and hear only what you are used to hearing.”

Religious doctrines are often based on ‘following’, on obeying the rules, obeying the teachers, respecting the hierarchy. But what if this obedience, lauded as a virtue, is used to silence concerns for wrong doings? To cover up what needs to be shown in the open. Harm is then compounded by using the religious rules, the religious virtues, for the advantage of the wrongdoers. Hurt is first done to the victims and then secondly on to the ones who see and are made to look away and be part of the conspiracy of silence.

An ARC kindly provided by the publishers via Netgalley

I enjoyed the book and subject matter. I thought it was well researched and handled in a respectful way.

As far as the format goes, I give that 2 stars. It was impossible to read in a Kindle format and very difficult through the NetGalley app. It took me a while to get through it.

DNF - As excited as I was for the opportunity to read this book, the format just didn't work for me. The story sounded very interesting so I'm sure there are many readers who will appreciate it for everything that it is.

Thanks to the University of Iowa Press and NetGalley for allowing me the opportunity to read and review Amy Frykholm's 'High Hawk.'

Set in the 1970s and 80s in the Windy Creek Reservation in South Dakota this novel features as its main character a priest whose been exiled to the reservation and finds himself, decades later questioning everything that's happened in his life and ministry. He's a white man ministering to a native American population who've been abused and undermined for centuries and continue to suffer the trauma associated with that history.

In 1970 he finds a baby boy who's subsequently taken in - without official sanction - by Alice, a native woman who has her own children and is a community leader and a close friend and support of Fr. Joe. It's when Bear, properly named Bernard, is accused of attempted murder that Fr. Joe is forced to face and address the role that church - and he specifically - has had in the abuse of the native population. Into this already complex situation is injected a long-lost but not forgotten friendship with a woman he knew when he was a seminarian.

The experiences of both the priest and the Native people are delicately handled and the book is well-written and powerful in shining more light on the religious and institutional abuse of Native people particularly but the sexual abuse and pedophilia hidden and moved along by the church for decades.

It's a bleak novel, there are no happy endings here, though there could be for the priest but not the people he was responsible for,.