A review by probablyjenna
Where They Last Saw Her by Marcie R. Rendon

medium-paced

3.5

Where They Last Saw Her by Marcie Rendon is a hard book for me to review, so I’m going to split it into a list of what I liked and disliked. 

Quick summary: Quill is an Indigenous woman who has lived on the Red Pine reservation her entire life. She’s married to a great man, and together they have two small children. She has a passion for running, and is training for the Boston Marathon with two of her close friends. But one day on a run, she hears a scream in the woods and from that day forward, she finds herself falling deeper into a dark conspiracy happening on the reservation.

Likes:

• We need more books by Native American women to hit the mainstream, and this one has a lot of the marks to do that. Rendon writes about the disappearances of Indigenous women, a topic people are often ignorant of or simply don’t know enough about. I am glad this book exists.
• While I didn’t find Quill likable, I feel like she was a well-developed character who found herself in a really difficult situation. Her choices sometimes bothered me, but they made sense for her character in those moments.
• Some readers may dislike this, but I love that Rendon sprinkled a lot of Ojibwe words/phrases into the story. The context is there to figure out the meaning, and it truly centers the community this book represents.
• Rendon knows the story she’s telling and is not afraid of showing how dark it is. She does not hold back, and I appreciate that.

Dislikes:

• This is almost all telling rather than showing, and it really makes the book feel dry. The writing is quite simplistic: person does this, then this, then this. There is very little attempt to show this world to us.
• There is so much superfluous information. I tested to see it I could skip big chunks of chapters and still understand what was going on, and yup, it was easy to find spots in the book that were skippable because they added nothing to the plot or characters. I would go back & read the sections I skipped just to be sure I hadn’t missed anything - nope, just unnecessary paragraphs of telling.
• Random PSAs. Yes, this topic is of massive importance but there is a way of showing that through craft that does not involve the characters delivering lines about MMIW without it feeling as if they are speaking to an audience. It made several sections feel inauthentic because characters seemed to be breaking the third wall and talking to readers rather than the other characters.

Overall, I’m glad I read this and I hope more people pick it up. While it has its issues (in my opinion), the actual story is really compelling and one that needs to be told.