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Jul 11, 2017SCL_Justin rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
Like his classic Essex County, Roughneck is a story featuring a hockey player. Derek Ouellette had a stint with the Rangers where he was a violent goon, and now he lives in a small town in northern Ontario working at a diner and beating people up. When his sister comes to town to get away from a terrible boyfriend things change. Sort of. What I love about this book is its handling of violence. It's not a hugely complicated story, but the resolution shows exactly the kind of earned change I want to see in fiction. The toughest thing about this book is that Jeff Lemire is a white guy telling stories about indigenous people. On that topic he's said, “For me, these were a way to educate myself, that’s what it comes down to. And I hope my experiences up there allowed me to create something and reflect what I saw and show other people.” That makes sense to me, but like Lemire I need to work out my thoughts in writing and I'm not from a community that has my story told for me, so I'm kind of primed to be sympathetic. I understand that it's crappy to have white dudes in all these spaces. Don't read white people's writing about indigenous people: read (and pay) indigenous people telling their own stories. But I like this specific story, even if it's a symptom of greater terribleness in the world.