by Joseph Boyden
Oh dear.I don't deny that this tale of the first encounters between the Jesuit priests and the Huron and Iroquois is well written. Not at all. Nor do I deny that it's well-researched, or that it provides a much-needed alternative point of view to the account of the first contact that we all know, di...
Let me start my review by saying that this book is amazing. But at the same time I have to issue a trigger warning, because this novel contains a fair amount of torture scenes and sexual violence (I will come back to this further on in my review). The Orenda tells the story of a Huron-Wendat warri...
Mitreißender "Clash of Civilizations" und ein spannender Abschnitt kanadischer Geschichte. Die Rezension in voller Länge gibt es hier.
Joseph Boyden’s powerful historical war novel, Orenda, takes place in the mid-1600 in Lower Canada when First Nations tribes and French Jesuit priests collided with each other in their quest for supremacy. Like all wars then and now, battles were won and lost with gratuitous violence and cruelty. Th...
In the remote winter landscape a brutal massacre and the kidnapping of a young Iroquois girl violently re-ignites a deep rift between two tribes. The girl’s captor, Bird, is one of the Huron Nation’s great warriors and statesmen. Years have passed since the murder of his family, and yet they are nev...
“The Orenda” is a fictionalized account that takes place in central Ontario around the mid 1600’s and covers the last years of the Huron Confederacy after they have formed a trade relationship with the French and before their dispersal by the Iroquois. The story is told from three perspectives and t...
I felt that the book was disjointed and while for the most part I could tell who main speaker was, there were times that I was unable to. There was also the problem that I couldn't tell what point in time the chapter was, even though it was clear that time passed in the novel, mainly due to the ag...
I always knew about the Martyr's Shrine in Midland, Ontario, but never really understood the story behind it. This book is more or less a retelling of the Martyr's story and Boyden, apparently, used the journals of Jean de Brébeuf, one of the six priests immortalized at the shrine, in the research ...
A masterful example of using alternating narrative focalized through different characters who see each other quite differently than the ways in which they see themselves. That the characters each represent one of the cultural groups involved in a fraught moment of history makes their individual atti...
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