Charles is the adult son of white parents but was raised by
his white mother and Penobscot stepfather on a reservation in Maine. Since he has no Penobscot blood, Charles
lives just the other side of the river from the reservation, where he can see
the home of his daughter, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth’s mother, Mary, has raised her daughter to believe that she is
the daughter of Mary’s Penobscot husband. Charles is obsessed with having his
daughter know that he is her biological father.
Mary, on the other hand, is adamant that this knowledge will upset
Elizabeth and jeopardize her standing in their Native American community.
However, Elizabeth seems to have inherited mental illness—depression—from
Charles’s mother, Louise, who now also suffers from dementia. Unfortunately, there is just not enough here
to make for an engrossing novel, and I was not invested in Charles or any of
the other characters. His two friends,
Bobby (an alcoholic) and Gizos, whose lie during their childhood made Charles a
pariah, are not exactly paragons of virtue.
I would have liked Elizabeth’s story to have been a little more fleshed
out, but that is not possible since the book is told from Charles’s
perspective, and he is very much in the dark about Elizabeth’s life. Charles is a good soul; he’s just not very
remarkable.
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