A Song over Miskwaa Rapids: A Novel

Half-Dime Hill is a novel that combines a fifty-year-old mystery with a present-day struggle over family, land, and history. When a rock is dislodged from its slope, the past rises to meet the present, revealing a gruesome secret that has been kept for half a century. Margie Robineau, who is fighting to keep her family's allotment land, uncovers events connected to a long-ago escape plan across the Canadian border and the burial of two crimes. As the past returns to haunt those involved, Margie prepares her statement for the tribal government, defending her family's land from a casino development and sorting the truths of Half-Dime Hill from the facts that remain there. A chorus of spirit women gather in lawn chairs with coffee and cookies to reminisce, reflect, and speculate, spinning the threads of family, myth, history, and humor.

Format: Hardback
Length: 128 pages
Publication date: 07 November 2023
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press

A fifty-year-old mystery converges with a present-day struggle over family, land, and history in Half-Dime Hill, now available in paperback. When a rock is dislodged from its slope by mischievous ancestors, the past rises to meet the present, and Half-Dime Hill gives up a gruesome secret it has kept for half a century. Some people of Mozhay Point have theories about what happened, while others know—and the discovery stirs memories long buried, reviving a terrible story yet to be told. Returning to the fictional Ojibwe reservation in northern Minnesota, Linda LeGarde Grover reveals traumas old and new as Margie Robineau, in the midst of a fight to keep her family's long-held allotment land, uncovers events connected to a long-ago escape plan across the Canadian border, and the burial—at once figurative and painfully real—of not one crime but two. While Margie is piecing the facts together, Dale Ann is confronted by her own long-held secrets and the truth that the long ago and the now, the vital and the departed, are all indelibly linked, no matter how much we try to forget. As the past returns to haunt those involved, Margie prepares her statement for the tribal government, defending her family's land from a casino development and sorting the truths of Half-Dime Hill from the facts that remain there. Throughout the narrative, a chorus of spirit women gather in lawn chairs with coffee and cookies to reminisce, reflect, and speculate, spinning the threads of family, myth, history, and humor—much as Grover spins another tale of Mozhay Point, weaving together an intimate and complex novel of a place and its people. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

Weight: 322g
Dimension: 147 x 217 x 19 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781517914622