"A gripping mystery tinged with horror from an award-winning debut writer, Bad Cree intertwines waking and dreaming worlds with Cree worldview to confront the toll of a legacy of violence on one Indigenous family and the land they call home. When Mackenzie, a young Cree woman living in Vancouver, wakes up with a severed crow's head in her hands, she panics. Only moments earlier she had been fending off masses of birds in a snow-covered forest. In bed, when she blinks, the head disappears. This is not the first time Mackenzie has brought something back from a dream. Night after night, she returns to a memory from before her sister, Sabrina's untimely death: a weekend at the family's lakefront campsite, long-forgotten in a fog of guilt and grief. But now that the waking world is closing in, too--murders of crows begin following her around the city, she wakes up from a dream of drowning throwing up water, and texts from someone claiming to be Sabrina demand that she go home--Mackenzie realizes this is more than she can handle alone. Traveling north to her rural hometown on First Nations land, she finds her beloved Big Prairie scarred by the oil companies' speedy boom and bust. Her family, still steeped in the same grief that Mackenzie ran away to Vancouver to escape, welcomes her back, but their shaky reunion only seems to intensify her dreams--and make them more dangerous. What really happened that night on the lake, and what did it have to do with Sabrina's death? Only a bad Cree would put their family at risk, but what if whatever has been calling Mackenzie home was already inside?"--Provided by the publisher.
