REVIEW: Yellow Bird by Sierra Crane Murdoch

 

I read this book because it was suggested by one of my favorite Podcasts: Women and Crime. I'm a Patreon member, and they do a book club, and this was the recent pick for it.  It is right up my alley - I read and enjoyed Killers of the Flower Moon so this was right up my alley. In this book, a young white oil worker named Kristopher Clarke ("KC") goes missing from a reservation that is experiencing an oil boom. Lissa Yellow Bird, a Native woman with no connection to KC decides she's going to find out what happened to him. This book chronicles her search.

Murdoch, I don't think, had intended to write this book. She is a journalist who was traveling to the oil fields in North Dakota to chronicle the oil boom on the reservations there and just happened to stumble upon this. During the course of her impeccable, on site, research, she became friends with Lissa, her family and children and Lissa's friends.  Lissa was a natural person to investigate - she is a member of the tribes that live on the reservation and she has a dogged mentality that led to her getting obsessed with this case and trying to follow it through to the end. Lissa herself is as complicated as the case was - she's an addict and that addiction impacted her parenting.  Having said that, she was a very protective mother and she tried to do the best that she could under the circumstances. She often felt alone and alienated on the reservation, which contributed to the choices she made. 

What I loved about this book was how it combined the search for answers related to a crime with the impact of the boom on the people that lived with it.  Murdoch weaves these two stories together in a masterful way. Her research is very deep. We learned about the skyrocketing violence and crime that resulted from the boom due to Murdoch's research and about the pain that the people living with the oil experience. I also loved learning about some of the ancestry of the tribe that  Lissa is a apart of.  She often talks about the land, her connection to it and how that connection has been severed. 

Definitely a must read.