Description
Amber Blaeser-Wardzala is an Anishinaabe writer, beader, fencer, and Jingle Dress Dancer from White Earth Nation in Minnesota. She received her MFA in Fiction from Arizona State University and her BA from Denison University. Her writing has been published in the bestselling Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology, The Iowa Review, Joyland, Passages North, CRAFT, and others. Blaeser-Wardzala was a 2022 Tin House Fellow and a 2021 Fellow for the inaugural Women’s National Book Association Authentic Voices Program and the 2024-25 George Bennett Fellow at Phillips Exeter Academy. Her short fiction was a finalist for Best of the Net and nominated for a Pushcart.
The debut novel by one of the bestselling Never Whistle at Night’s most memorable contributors, in which, after a young Anishinaabe woman vanishes, her sister tries to pick up the pieces of her broken family, even as her investigations put her at risk of suffering a similar fate.
Middle Sister is haunted by ghosts, many of whom are still living. Her ex-best friend and ex-boyfriend are walking relics of the girl she used to be, while her family—her activist mother, checked-out father, and attention-starved younger siblings—are reminders of the elder sister she can never live up to. Then there’s John Smith, the infamous white man with red cowboy boots living on stolen reservation land, whose obsessive attentions are as repellent as they are compelling. But most of all, there are the thousands of unacknowledged missing and murdered Indigenous women, including Older Sister, whose year-long absence from the reservation has torn her remaining family apart.
As the living ghosts draw closer, Middle Sister decides to start haunting them back: in particular the mysterious “Eric”—a white man from a neighboring town who Older Sister claimed to love, and who she swore loved her. Attempting to hunt down the correct white Eric in the haystack of Minnesota forces Middle Sister to seek help from the community from which she’s grown alienated, starting with her coworker, Casanova; a stray rez dog; and Nookomis, her grandmother who’s foreseen her own death. Yet John still lurks in the growing wintry shadows, offering a sort of surrender that Middle Sister can’t help being drawn to. In the end, she must choose: either let the guilt consume her or forgive herself and fight.