He’s hardworking and kind and tries to maintain steady jobs and tender relationships, but he’s programmed to continually escape. She replies helplessly, “It’s like most of me is gone and I can’t get it back.”Īdrift without skills, money or parenting, Kenny slides into the sordid life of Vancouver’s Downtown East Side. “Aren’t you glad I’m home?” he asks, confused when she continues to withdraw. But after seven years without him, she no longer knows how to be a mother. He makes it home to his mother, who has missed him desperately.

We first follow the sweetly rebellious Kenny, who successfully flees the school at age 13.

It’s that shimmering light that propels us through even the darkest scenes. We know from the prologue that while not all the characters make it, some do, going beyond all expectations. Instead, she follows their individual and interwoven lives after they were released - or escaped - from the school in the 1970s. While Good makes it clear these five young people suffered horrors during their years at an “Indian school” on Vancouver Island, she doesn’t dwell on that. With her economical prose, she draws her characters with enormous compassion and without judgment. But here, in “Five Little Indians,” she’s a storyteller. Good, who is also a lawyer, has certainly been political in her life as an advocate. To that end, Good, a member of Saskatchewan’s Red Pheasant Cree Nation, has written the novel “Five Little Indians.”ĭespite its glib title - a nod to the classic Agatha Christie mystery “Ten Little Indians,” whose title in turn comes from an offensive 19th-century minstrel-show ditty - the novel is an intense depiction of how life unfolds for five likeable young people once they’re out of residential school. And as one who straddles both worlds - she didn’t go to such a school but her life has been surrounded by survivors - she’s well positioned to heighten that awareness. “I choose to believe that this response arises from a lack of awareness,” she wrote.

As she explains in a note to reviewers of her new book, it’s a question that those who never attended such schools - the last of which closed almost a quarter-century ago - have for those who did: Why can’t they just get over it and move on?

But as the daughter and granddaughter of people who did, the long-time advocate for residential school survivors says a certain question often comes up. Michelle Good never went to a residential school.

Michelle good five little indians