Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this eARC.

Lauren Haddad's "Fireweed" captures the essence of personal and communal struggle with a deft touch.

Set against the backdrop of a small, fire-ravaged town in the Pacific Northwest, "Fireweed" follows the journey of protagonist Amelia, a botanist who returns to her hometown after a devastating wildfire. What begins as a mission to study the regrowth of fireweed—a resilient plant that thrives in disturbed soil—soon becomes a deeper exploration of Amelia's fractured relationship with her past and the community she left behind.

Haddad masterfully intertwines themes of ecological renewal and personal redemption. The fireweed becomes a poignant symbol of rebirth, mirroring Amelia's struggle to rebuild her life from the ashes of her past. The novel delves into complex issues such as loss, forgiveness, and the enduring power of nature.

The character development in "Fireweed" Amelia is a richly drawn protagonist whose vulnerability and strength make her journey compelling and relatable. The supporting characters, from the taciturn park ranger to the elderly town historian, are equally well-crafted, each adding depth and nuance to the narrative.

Haddad's ability to breathe life into her characters is evident in their authentic dialogues and interactions. The town of Cedar Hill feels like a living, breathing entity, with its inhabitants' shared history and collective grief adding layers of texture to the story.

Lauren Haddad's prose is lyrical and evocative, painting vivid pictures of the charred landscape and the fragile beauty of new growth. Her descriptions of the Pacific Northwest are lush and immersive, drawing readers into the heart of the wilderness. The narrative flows seamlessly, with each chapter revealing new facets of Amelia's journey and the town's recovery.

"Fireweed" is a strong debut that showcases Lauren Haddad's talent for storytelling. It is a novel that speaks to the resilience of the human spirit and the healing power of nature.

However, for me despite these strengths, it fell short on delivery for me. I love mystery novels, and it wasn't quite a mystery.

We were promised a book focused on the indigenous community, however, for me the focus was more on the guilt of the protagonist.

A well-written book from a debut author, with a more focused view, her next novel should be stellar.

Lauren Haddad’s *Fireweed* is an introspective novel with beautiful prose and a strong sense of place. The themes of resilience and growth are compelling, and the story captures moments of quiet poignancy.

That said, the pacing is slow, and the plot sometimes feels aimless, making it hard to stay fully engaged. The characters, while well-drawn, lack the development needed to leave a lasting impact.

*Fireweed* has its strengths in atmosphere and emotion but falls short of being truly memorable. A solid read for those who enjoy reflective, character-driven stories, but it doesn’t quite reach its full potential.

I started this and couldn’t get into it ultimately. Unfortunately, it didn’t help that I saw many negative reviews before going into the book which made it harder to stay engaged.

The story centers on a white woman struggling with her past, rather than exploring larger systemic issues affecting Indigenous communities. The book’s audience is unclear—it’s marketed as a thriller, but those readers may be disappointed, and those looking for a meaningful take on social issues might find the portrayal of Indigenous people shallow and stereotypical.

The release timing, just before National Day of Recognition for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, feels opportunistic, and the writing is disjointed and hard to follow.

Overall, Fireweed doesn’t tackle the real problems faced by Indigenous communities and instead focuses on white guilt, missing the mark in both storytelling and social commentary.

it was definitely SUPPOSED to be about the problems impacting native american communities. it just never read like it. our protag's problems were always centered and the issues never felt addressed. the writing felt unclear. 2 stars. tysm for the arc.

This is not what I was expecting as I thought that this would follow a more traditional crime/thriller narrative but I did enjoy large parts of it. I think that it’s well written and captures the obsessions that are bred out of loneliness and the reach of everyone having to have a neighbour that they can look down on. There’s even a moment where the protagonist Jenny is so desperately seeking a way to connect with the world that she’s intruded upon while looking for her neighbour that she oversteps and over-identifies and the novel presents this in an intriguing but complex light. I think my ultimate problem with the novel and why it’s not reviewed higher is that in the latter third of the novel, having had the disappearance of a First Nations woman driving the plot, she’s abandoned rather in favour of an existential crisis of Jenny’s and the resolution of that offering itself in resolution as a whole. It felt like a second - and unintentional - disappearance that weakened the impact of this as a whole.

This was such a truly tantalizing story that i can not get out of my head! Overall, this book is a gripping page-turner that will leave you feeling pensive and emotional at times. It reads like a true story, drawing you in with its authenticity.

I enjoyed this book and the way the author wrote. The story was very good and I like that it brought awareness to the subject of native woman and there disappearances as well as lack of interest by the public and authorities. Unfortunately I feel like the ending was rushed and it felt unfinished to me.

I struggled to read this book mostly because I really couldn't find anything redeeming about Jenny. I found her annoying and this book was a character study of her when I much would've rather found out more about Rachelle

(3.5 stars)
"Being broke germinates all sorts of magical thinking." Fireweed is a bit of a dreary book about intergenerational abuse and poverty in a place called Prince George in Western Canada. The city is known for racism and violence against Indigenous people, particularly women, with Highway 16 nicknamed the Highway of Tears for all the Indigenous women who have gone missing or been found murdered along it. The book is written from the perspective of Jenny Hayes, a white women, who has grown up imbued in this racist context: "No one had ever had to educate me. It was a rule so self-evidence, it was innate—felt, as palpable as the dank. You stayed on your side, and they stayed on theirs." Except she's lonely, and becomes fascinated by her Indigenous neighbour, surveilling her, and trying to strike up a friendship.

When her neighbour goes missing, Jenny comes face to face with the town's racism as she galvinises into action only to find nobody really cares about missing Indigenous women. Her motives are primarily selfish I think, a chance to break free from: "Reliable old Jenny, always exactly where you expected her to be, guileless, in her stonewashed jeans and Keds." This makes her a bit too white saviour to be likeable: "Even if they were selling their bodies, no one deserved a fate like that—to end up among the beer cans, the A&W cartons, the thistle, the hemlock, the fireweed all the litter the highway's shoulder housed."

At the same time you can't help but feel sorry for Jenny as a product of the poverty and racism she grew up wthin: "My old bedroom, the walls still sponge-painted that same awful pink. PeptoBismol, calamine. The color of feeling itchy." Her dysfunctional mother continues to exploit her. Her relationship isn't ideal, with her keeping "wife insurance" hidden away. Her husband betrays her when she is raped. She doesn't like sex: "A whole lot of fanfare for the same sensation you could get from tearing down a rutted road." She (or her husband) are infertile: "She'd never had any kids, her body a lemon—like mine."

Looking for her neighbour Rachelle busts Jenny out of the world she is trapped in: "caught in the same loop, each day melded into the next." That's when the book gets a little faster and less dreary: "Mystery wasn't going to solve itself." However it feels a little Nancy Drew: somewhat at the expense of her neighbour rather than with and for her. Only pick it up if you're in the mood for a sombre and depressing read.

This is a singularly engaging and suspenseful variation on an archetypal mystery form: a committed amateur sets out to get to the bottom of the apparent disappearance of a friend…when no one else in her world, even the police, seems to take the missing woman’s disappearance seriously.

The setting of ‘Fireweed’ is brilliantly original. It takes place in far-Western Canada, a wild, wooded landscape that, paradoxically, is marred by mines, factories, and rural sprawl. Jenny Hayes, the novel’s narrator and protagonist, is a smart but sparsely educated mall gift shop employee. She’s young, recently married, and longing to get pregnant.

Jenny has recently attempted to befriend her neighbor, a beautiful Native American widow with two children. There’s a substantial Indian population in the area, most of whom, as their white counterparts see them, are lazy and unworthy of their attention. Jenny and her neighbor are just working through their mutual distrust when the Native woman disappears, and her mixed-race children are taken in by social services.
Finding her friend—or at least discovering the woman’s fate—becomes Jenny’s quest. She makes slow progress in finding her friend, but does discover the depth of prejudice toward Native peoples held by the authorities and even her own friends and family.

Her quest leads her to a searing and tragic discovery about her dystopian world and its assumptions about the ‘Other’ it so disregards and dismisses.

Fireweed was an interesting character study but one that was, unfortunately, very challenging for me to get through; taking me much longer to read than I had hoped. Many times, I was close to a DNF but my curiosity got the best of me. The description of this book feels accurate but it didn't quite live up to what I wanted it to be. Like other reviewers have mentioned, the writing and the characters feel insensitive and a little too "white savior" for my preference. I'm not sure that I would recommend this book to anyone, especially not to those who are looking for a book that lifts up Indigenous stories.

DNF at 17%

I went into this book, based on its description, anticipating a Lynchian take on exploring and amplifying the stories of missing and murdered Indigenous women. What I found instead was a white narrator who was not only incredibly caught up in the minutia of her own life, but also was incredibly racist.

There were multiple instances of use of the “s——“ slur in reference to the solitary Native American character who speaks within the first quarter of the book, along with consistent reinforcement of negative stereotypes, like Indigenous people not being civilized enough to garden.

I would like to believe that the purpose of this was to try to challenge white readers who may hold unconscious bias or racist attitudes toward Indigenous folks to recognize the problems with these types of beliefs, but this likely good intention, for me, landed with a cringe-inducing thud.

It was quite painful to read, and when the lead character received one opportunity to correct her casually racist behavior, checked herself on it, and then went right back to the same behavior, I decided to put it down. I’m sure there is a story arc somewhere about her challenging her beliefs, but through the way this narrative is set up, I am leery of white saviorism being a big part of Jenny’s story. A Goodreads review flagged with a spoiler warning also reinforced my apprehension and made me not want to finish this book.

The author’s writing is capable of being quite beautiful, but it felt a bit dissonant when the narrator, who refers to herself as “trailer trash,” occasionally waxes poetic with a vocabulary that seems more befitting of her well-educated author than her own voice.

I was really looking forward to this, but ultimately it was so much heavier handed than what I was hoping for. Stories about Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, especially the horrific Highway of Tears, deserve to be told, but I think this story would have been more effectively told by an Indigenous author or at the very least with more care to exclude less racist language. I think it’s in pretty poor taste to have this published by someone who isn’t Indigenous.

Thank you very much to Astra House and Lauren Haddad for the e-arc.

As someone who has been affected by the MMIW epidemic, I really don’t care for unnecessary white voices on this subject matter.

Not really sure what this book was trying to say by the end. This was a painful read. The unedited stream of conscious was incredibly boring. The protagonist was cartoonish ignorant.

I should have DNF’d this book

This book just wasn’t for me. I couldn’t keep going unfortunately. The writing style was just so strange and disjointed. It felt like it was trying to do a stream of consciousness but it was executed badly. I’ve read other books in this style and loved them.

Furthermore, the plot wasn’t appealing or intriguing.

Thanks to Astra Publishing House and NetGalley for the arc in exchange for an honest review

I really wanted to like this a lot, but I didn't like it as much as I thought I would. It had a good mystery but it didn't flow as well nor was it fast paced as I had hoped.

DNF @25%

I was excited about this book thinking that it would be a thriller highlighting the fact that indigenous women go missing constantly without being searched for like white women are. This is a very scary and real fact and I hoped for some social commentary that highlights how wrong this is while uplifting indigenous voices.

I knew this was written by a white woman but hoped the sensitive topic would be treated with care, but unfortunately it just rubbed me the wrong way that the main character was the white woman and all the focus was on her. There were so many racist stereotypes mentioned and I understand the author was trying to portray how horrible these assumptions can be... but I really don't see the need for them here.

It was an interesting one to read, exploring important topics like racism, sexism. But I think I liked the first half od the book more than the second half which was a but of a character study and I am usually not the one who likes that. Might be just a personal preference. Worth a read in any case.

Slowburns are fun but this was a little too slow to not become boring. Thank you to NetGalley, the author and the publisher for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you to Netgallery and Astra Publishing House for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

This story follows Jenny Hayes as she navigates life as a housewife, infertility, and the disappearance of her First Nations neighbor, Rachelle.

If you want to read a story about a protagonist with a White Savior complex, this book is for you. I had very high expectations for this book, namely that justice would be done to highlight the MMIW movement. This book significantly missed the mark. I was disappointed that this story focused very little on the Indigenous experience and instead was just another white protagonist's perspective. Jenny is a white, bored housewife who believes she is going to solve Rachelle's case and takes it upon herself to investigate, all the while imposing herself in another missing girls' search and Indigenous community.

The lack of alternative perspective and lack of story development led to several problematic stereotypes:
- Calling an Indigenous character "the man with the braid" instead of giving him a name for most of the book.
-Jenny's assumption that "the man with the braid" was abusive based solely on his looks. This reinforces the stereotype of Indigenous men engaging in DV.
- Using racist terms like "sq--," which were unnecessary and harmful.
-"Indian time" was mentioned and depicted several times.
-MMIW go missing because they like to "party."
-MMIW go missing because they are engaging in sex work.
-Indigenous people can't garden/plant.
-Indigenous people littering the streets of the big city because of their substance misuse.

I read that the author owed this book to the people of Prince George. Unfortunately, this book is a complete disservice to Indigenous people, as there were no positive attributes of Indigenous people or culture highlighted within this work.

I will not recommend this book to others due to the harmful narrative. I would especially caution Indigenous readers (like myself) from picking this book up.