In particular, the love between them all made my heart swell. I came to love these characters for both their flaws and for their strengths. I appreciated that each individual story/experience was both dependent and independent of the other characters/storylines and that they all varied in length and closure but not in impact. In the same vein, each of the characters also heals (or doesn’t heal) differently.

In doing this, Good shows us that coping with trauma is an incredibly individual experience. All stemming from the same “school” with the same authority figures and at points even the same abuse, each child copes vastly differently through their adult years. My favourite thing about how Michelle Good created this story is how individual each of the characters feel.

Following Lucy, Maisie, Clara, Kenny, and Howie from their years before the residential school, then at the same Mission school in British Columbia, and then during the decades that followed their various departures from the school, Good expertly crafts a multi-voiced, intersecting, heart-wrenching story that is equally full of trauma, healing, heartache, and hope.

Michelle Good’s Five Little Indians is a uniquely told story of five residential/Mission School survivors. Content warning: child sexual assault/abuse, abuse by church authorities, kidnapping, residential schools

Book 5 little indians