Fireweed

About Fireweed

For readers of Amanda Peters and Tana French; a subversion of the missing woman plot that follows a white housewife’s misguided investigation into the disappearance of her Indigenous neighbor.

In the mowed-down industrial north of Prince George, Canada, housewife Jenny Hayes shares a fence with the only First Nations woman in the neighborhood, Rachelle, and her two little girls. Jenny desperately wants a child and can’t understand why Rachelle, with her trash-pocked and overgrown yard, should have what Jenny wants most in the world. But Jenny tries to suppress her judgment as she has with her mother Fi, a cougar who chain smokes cigarettes instead of changing the full diapers of her boyfriend’s kids, and Missy, her best friend with Juicy Couture pulled tight over her baby bump and an unfurnished McMansion. Instead, she volunteers to babysit Rachelle’s girls—brushing hair, folding laundry, and ignoring the stilettos tucked under the bed in Rachelle’s disheveled home.

But when two young women—the strawberry blonde, blue-eyed Beth Tremblay and Jenny’s own neighbor, Rachelle—disappear along Highway 16, only Beth’s face and name are plastered on billboards and broadcasted over the air. Rachelle’s daughters are carted off by the state, and Jenny takes it upon herself to investigate. After all, Jenny thinks, who else is looking for her “squaw” neighbor? Jenny stutters through police encounters, asks the Métis people living on the Rez all the wrong questions, and ultimately faces the question of why, in the spectacle of tragedy, she involves herself.

With great awareness and care, Lauren Haddad brilliantly exposes both our impulse to mythologize marginalized communities and the damage we do when privileging our own value system over others’. Gripping, subversive, and prophetic, Fireweed begs the question, what do we do with a person who isn’t bad, but who does no good?