by Brandon Hobson
Overall: The Removed tells the story of a Cherokee family in the aftermath of their oldest teenage son’s death in a police shooting. When the reader meets them fifteen years after Ray-Ray’s death, everyone in the family has coped differently. Parents Maria and Ernest have tried to keep their son’s memory alive with an annual bonfire; Ray-Ray’s sister Sonja lives alone near her parents, engaging in brief flings with much younger men. And the youngest brother Edgar has moved to New Mexico and become addicted to drugs. To add complication, Ernest has begun to suffer the effects of Alzheimer’s, erasing parts of his memory, and Maria gets a call requesting that she serve as an emergency foster placement for Wyatt, a teenage boy. And there’s a layer of generational trauma from an ancestor relating parts of the forced removal of the Cherokee people to Oklahoma. If you decide to read this one, I highly recommend the audio version, which has a full cast voicing the different characters’ sections.
Likes: I connected the most with the character of Maria, the matriarch of the family. Her grief and resignation about her oldest son’s murder and her husband’s dementia contrasted beautifully with her short bursts of hope and joy when Wyatt enters her life. Each character’s voice is distinct; the book demonstrates how a single traumatic event has multiple long-lasting effects. Maria’s sections have beautiful, lyric prose that married the touches of magical realism wit the dark realities of their stories.
Dislikes: There are so many stories going on that it was sometimes hard for me to track; very few get a solid resolution. I don’t mind some ambiguity in endings, but I would have liked more of the storylines to reach a conclusion. I struggled with Edgar’s sections, which blended modern elements (a videogame, holograms) with myth and dreamscape (the Darkening Land) in a way that at times felt confusing and forced to me. The repetition of the word “fowl” in one section made for difficult listening.
FYI: murder, gun violence, drug use, death of a family member, child neglect, genocide, anti-Native American discrimination & prejudice.
Liz Helfrich 