Along Highway 16 in Prince George, British Columbia, Canada, women have been disappearing since 1969. It seems, though, only white women are counted in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's efforts of finding these women. Indigenous women, (who make up the majority of the missing), are sadly, forgotten.
This is a fictional work about a woman named Jenny Hayes, who's neighbor, Rachelle, goes missing after Jenny befriends her. Jenny seems to be the only person looking for Rachelle and even though there are definite clues of foul play, no one else seems to care. Rachelle is the only First Nations woman living on Jenny's street. This is also felt like a coming-of-age novel for Jenny, who spends the summer coming to grips with herself, her family drama and her missing neighbor. I was riveted.

*Special thanks to NetGalley and *Astra Books for this digital e-arc.*

I really enjoyed this book and the build up was incredible. I feel as though the author handled the main character’s internal conflict very realistically. However, the ending just really fell flat for me. It seemed as though all the internal work was for nothing.

In a rust belt town in British Columbia, a white housewife becomes obsessed with her Indigenous neighbor’s disappearance … and the community’s indifference to it.

“Fireweed” (Astra House, $27) by Lauren Haddad unravels a slow-burning mystery laced with keen social critique, as Jenny’s search forces her to confront uncomfortable truths about race, class and her own blind spots. Unflinching and quietly devastating, this novel explores the stories we tell to justify injustice — and the ones we finally start listening to when it’s too late.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Astra Publishing for the free e-ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Fireweed explores the marginalization of missing indigenous women living in poverty in Canada and how difficult it can be to "do the right thing" when systemic powers and your own insecurities hold you back. I really enjoyed the first half of the story as its a slow burn thriller of the missing women and the search for what happened. However, this theme gets lost in the second half of the book when the story switches into more of a character story of Jenny and her bumbling quest to find out what happened. The second half pretty much lost my interest as the author rambled off course. 2.5 stars rounded up.

I feel like Firewood should be an important read for the themes it covers. But, it pains me to say that I also feel like it wasn't executed as well as it could have been. The plight of Rachelle and the other missing Indigenous women was overshadowed by Jenny's conspiracy theories, so many of which were based on prejudice and miseducation.

And while I appreciated the idea that all the women in the book were victims of some form of abuse or violence, it seemed to dilute the message. I felt like it lost focus sometimes.

Additionally, I thought the tendril ARCs around Jenny being untethered and unfulfilled as a mother were the most interesting, but honestly wish they had been explored in a separate book.

*Fireweed* pulls you in with its raw, emotional storytelling and complex characters. It makes you think about privilege, justice, and who gets heard. A thought-provoking read that stays with you.

(I received a free copy of the book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review! )

Reading this book was a struggle. The story and the points the book were trying to make were important but they got bogged down in the dismal day to day work of Jenny. She is a listless part time employed housewife whose husband is gone for long stretches of time. She and her friends make assumptions about First Nations people, extending to her own neighbor. Once one is disproved, Jenny replaces it with another. Throughout the book are assumptions that Jenny has made about people. I didn't enjoy being in her head for those. After slightly befriending her First Nation neighbor, Rachelle, she becomes obsessed when Rachelle disappears. Okay, solid plot opportunity! But then it meanders on with Jenny trying to investigate, the police pushing her off, and no one even Rachelle's family helping her. This book is listed as literary fiction and not a mystery, which gives a good indication that Rachelle's absence is not the main focus. But again, the arc of the book is as listless as Jenny. As long as you aren't asking too much from the story, this is a likeable read.

Jenny's bored. She married at eighteen and now sits around with only a very part-time retail job to occupy her time, waiting to get pregnant. Prince George, British Colombia twenty years ago was not a place where young women made careers, at least not young women as directionless as Jenny. Her husband works long hours, weeks away from home and she doesn't like her family or anyone she knows, but she is fascinated by the woman with two young children who lives in the house behind hers, in no small part because the woman is Indigenous. They form a cautious acquaintanceship and when Rachelle disappears, Jenny decides that she will find her.

Fireweed is an odd book. The author isn't Canadian, nor does she live in Prince George, although she has spent time there. The novel is recounted from the point of view of a narrator who feel compelled to explain the details of Canadian life that the average American might be unfamiliar with, despite having never left Prince George. Jenny is also curiously disconnected from the place where she has spent her entire life. She has no friends she enjoys spending time with, she doesn't like her family, she doesn't like her husband's family or her husband, really. There is a sense that she looks down on everyone in her orbit as being trashy, but she hasn't found anything she likes more and her utter lack of curiosity about anything that isn't Rachelle is the most interesting thing about her. So a bored lady ineffectually tries to find a missing woman in a half-hearted way and that's the book.

There is, of course, a purpose to the book, to draw awareness to the real and horrific issue of the number of Indigenous woman and girls missing in Canada, and the work of the MMIWG movement. Laudable, sure, but the novel is set decades in the past which makes it seem like a problem from before and Jenny's lack of knowledge and endless returning to racist sterotyping made for sometimes unpleasant reading. Following Jenny as she wonders what the word "Métis" means (unlikely in someone educated in Canadian public schools, in my opinion) or is surprised whenever a First Nations house has a tidy yard or a vegetable garden was less an education than an exercise in frustration.

I'll end with the positive aspects of this book. Lauren Haddad writes proficiently and while this novel was a misstep for her, she may well be worth reading when she turns her attention to a setting she is more comfortable with.

I requested Fireweed by Lauren Haddad on Netgalley, thinking (based on the topic) that it must have been written by someone who's partly Indigenous or at least comes from British Columbia. But that's not the case. The fact that sometimes there's not enough information about the authors on there, especially if it's their first book, makes it all a gamble. If I knew this author wasn't Indigenous, I wouldn't have wanted to read it.

I understand what the author's trying to do in Fireweed, but centering the white woman is not it, and the Highway of Tears is an atrocious tragedy we shouldn't be talking about through how a clueless white woman sees it. I found Jenny to be a complex and quite nuanced character, but it shouldn't have been her that's drawn with so much attention to detail, while the actual victims are more like a backdrop.

It's uncomfortable and unpleasant to be inside the brain of a racist white woman, and it made me feel a lot of secondhand embarrassment and white shame. She does go through some character development: she learns not to use slurs and thinks about what being native to a land means, but there are still an awful lot of harmful stereotypes, and the conclusion of the story kind of undoes all her development.

It's a good character study, but I don't think the book was meant to be that. I also don't want to feel empathy for this ignorant white woman in this situation. I imagine it's quite a challenge to write a book from inside a racist person's mind (unless you're racist yourself 😬), but should we do it? Should we put white people in the center of BIPOC tragedies when it's already like that in real life? Also, there are just too many racist tropes and slurs in this book that made my stomach turn.

The book will be released a week before the National Awareness Day for Missing or Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, which I found to be in poor taste. I can't help but think that the non-Indigenous author and the publisher are trying to cash in on the memorial day by timing the release like this 😒

If you check other reviews, you'll see most people agreeing with me, so I'd highly encourage everyone to not buy this book!

I was really interested in this book from the synopsis, but found myself disappointed as I continued to read. I stopped about fifty pages into the book because I started suspecting the author might not be from the background they were writing about, and it seemed I was right after doing some research. For such a sensitive topic, I think we need more stories like this, and readers should be reading more challenging books like this, but the execution of this novel didn't sit well with me. I did end up finishing the novel to see what happens, as I wanted to see if my feelings would change, but they did not.

This book was HUGELY problematic for me! Written from a non-Indigenous perspective, the story is about a white woman jealous of a Native woman's children and who goes out of her way to care for them despite their 'trashy' mother. Too many things were wrong with this story than right and I can't recommend it at all.

I was looking forward to this until I realized that an Iraqi American woman (author) is profiting on the trauma of First Nations people and MMIW!
Thanks to the publisher for an ARC

I read the synopsis for Fireweed and thought 'this book is going to blow my mind' and 'this book will probably make me frustrated and uncomfortable that the world is cruel but it is bloody important I read this and educate myself'. 

Unfortunately, I don't think the book blew my mind, and yes it did make me frustrated and uncomfortable about how unfair this world is. But author Lauren Haddad's concentration on the main character Jenny, and the tangential storylines we follow did not put emphasis on the most important thing readers should have walked away with - knowledge and understanding of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls crisis. 

I know part of the point was to concentrate on Jenny's reckoning with the cruelty of the world and what happens to indigenous women on Highway 16, but I found Jenny clouded the important messages and I question any self reflection or racial reckoning. 

I think it's going to take me a while to accurately rate this book or reckon with it, but for now it's 2 stars and I'm going to do my own research into MMIWG.

Thank you NetGalley for this eArc.

White savior narrative, using missing & murdered Indigenous women gratuitously. For these reasons, I will not be supporting this book or this author.

I really liked that this book brings up the fact that indigenous women don’t get the support they should. They go missing at an alarming rate. This book takes you on the side of a white women who decides to help a neighbor, who she initially judges, and gets really invested. I thought the characters were well developed and got the message out about indigenous women. I think it’s definitely worth reading.

I didn’t like this novel one bit. I think I only kept reading because of the writing style. I couldn’t stand the protagonist, Jenny. She is a horrible person. Jenny is ignorant, racist, and a completely clueless human being. There’s no one to root for. Normally I don’t mind an unlikable protagonist but Jenny is insufferable. This book could have been a page turner and deeply profound but it’s just a pointless book about no one learning valuable lessons. A total waste of time.

Initially I dnf'ed this book at a little over 50% because it was honestly just not for me and I could not keep forcing myself to read it. However, after a few days, I ended up picking it up again just for the sake of saying I reached the end of it - which is to say that I did not change my initial opinion about the novel.

I went into this book with the idea that we, as the readers, were getting a powerful story about the missing indigenous women and girls of Highway 16. Instead, what I found was a story about a white woman named Jenny who's incredibly naive, ignorant and racist. She did check her own behavior and of those around her a few times but it felt like she always went back to the same pattern once again.

I was hoping to read a character arc, which we briefly get, but the ending made it seem like Jenny just went back to her own ways like in the begining which made it very frustrating. I do somehow see what the author was trying to do in her book but it felt like a failed opportunity to give the indigenous community a voice after being voiceless for so long.

The novel felt more like a character study on an uneducated and privileged white woman and it was disappointing to see the indigenous community once again taking the back seat to give space to white people.

This is an exploration into indigenous communities and while there is a lot of criticism about the way this was handled and the chosen publish date for this release, I found it good if tough to read.

The girl just can't help herself........

I don't think that I have come across a female lead character that exasperated me to this extent in eons. I am almost lost for words.

Lauren Haddad's intent for this debut novel just rolled off the planet into oblivion. From the synopsis we are led to believe that at the core would be a light shining on the missing Indigenous women and girls along Highway 16. The story takes place in Prince George, Canada.

We meet Jenny Hayes, a young woman in her twenties, who has been trying to get pregnant for five years. Motherhood eludes her. Her husband, Sam, works in the mines and is gone for two weeks at a time. Jenny's mother is a real piece of work who goes through boyfriends like pickin' petals off a flower. Their relationship is a fragile one.

Now here's where the wheels veer off the road. Jenny has lived across the street from an Indigenous woman for five years. They've had no interactions. Now all of a sudden Jenny notices her and wishes to be friends. Rachelle goes missing.

Lauren Haddad chisels Jenny into one naive woman who doesn't have a clue as to how to go about finding Rachelle. Her husband and her friends are a carnival of racist flatliners. Jenny turns over crucial evidence to the police who make no attempt to find Rachelle because she is an Indigenous woman. Jenny even flubs her meeting with another Indigenous woman who might be helpful. Throughout the storyline, Jenny falls asleep. Jenny slops ketchup on herself. Jenny takes off in her car without a plan in place. Then all of a sudden, Jenny is looking for her father.

Instead of the draw of this book being in regard to the plight of Indigenous women, we get non-stop Jenny episodes. We know what Jenny eats day after day. It was all about Jenny. Haddad should have had chapters reflecting Rachelle. Rachelle simply became a cardboard figure in the background. The storyline suffered greatly because of this.

Fireweed is a wasted opportunity. Period. If you're looking for a voice here in a deep response to these missing women and their grief stricken families, you won't find it here. But what you will find is......Jenny.

I received a copy of this book through NetGalley for an honest review. My thanks to Astra House and to Lauren Haddad for the opportunity.

This novel offers an intimate character study of a woman grappling with her own assumptions and prejudices, set against a vividly described backdrop that captures the quiet routines and tensions of suburban life. While the portrayal of the main character is compelling and complex, I found the book’s broader framing—particularly its engagement with the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG)—to be troubling. The story centers a white woman’s perspective and emotional journey while only lightly touching on the systemic violence and indifference that define the real-life context it draws from. The narrative also leans heavily on the lead’s personal transformation, which risks overshadowing the far more urgent realities facing Indigenous communities. While the novel may aim to critique passive complicity, it often lingers too long on the feelings of those adjacent to injustice rather than those most affected by it. In that sense, I remain unsure of what the book hoped to contribute to this conversation, and wish it had made more space for the voices and experiences at its heart.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for this e-arc in exchange for an honest review.