So I read Warrior Girl Unearthed (2023) by Angeline Boulley in September, and immediately had to read Boulley’s first book Firekeeper’s Daughter (2021, Goodreads Choice Award for YA), and was thrilled to find out she’s just published a third book, Sisters in the Wind (September 2, 2025), which I also devoured. They are each amazing YA thrillers set around the Sault Ste. Marie area of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and center the stories of Indigenous girls and women, specifically Ojibwe/ Anishinaabe.
I wouldn’t call them sequels, necessarily, and I don’t think you need to read them in any particular order, but they feature many of the same characters, primarily Daunis Fontaine, the protagonist in Firekeeper’s Daughter, and her nieces Perry and Pauline Firekeeper-Birch, who are protagonists in Warrior Girl Unearthed. Sisters in the Wind features Daunis as a secondary, but important character, and takes place between the events of the first two books, and centers Lucy Smith, a biracial 18-year old who has spent the last five years in the foster system after her father died and never told her that her birth mother was Ojibwe.
Boulley does an amazing job crafting anxiety-producing thrillers with characters that you want to get to know in person, set in a location that I want to visit. A day’s drive would actually take me there! In each book, she blends family drama with a touch of romance, and seamlessly illustrates issues with the laws that currently exist and problems faced by indigenous communities.
In Firekeeper’s Daughter, Daunis Fontaine is 18 years old, just graduated from high school, and was a star player on her high school’s men’s hockey team. Because of a shoulder injury, she didn’t play on a college team, but plans to attend the local college with her best friend Lily. Her family life is complicated, as her birth was the scandal of the time, because her white mother got pregnant with her at 18, by her Ojibwe father. Daunis’s grandmother sent her mother away until after Daunis was born, and in the meantime her father got another girl pregnant with her brother, Levi, only 3 months younger. Daunis grows up wealthy, not fitting into either the white world of her mother’s family, nor completely with her father’s family either. When she is approached to become a confidential informant by the FBI to try to find out who is supplying the drugs that are hurting her community, she agrees.
In Warrior Girl Unearthed, Perry Firekeeper-Birch is looking forward to a summer of slack, fishing on Lake Superior as often as she can. But her famous lead foot leads to a minor car accident, and her Auntie Daunis requires her to work to pay off the repairs. The work, as an intern for the tribal museum, is way more interesting than she anticipates, and she learns about NAGPRA, the law that allows tribes to request the return of both remains and sacred items held by governmental entities (including universities). She has the same sense of duty as her Auntie, and she is angered by all of the red tape and frustrated by the lack of resources given to missing and murdered indigenous women and girls. Perry and her twin Pauline, the perfect one, make some questionable choices as teens do, but their determination to find and return their ancestors is impressive, and the heist they pull off is satisfying.
In Sisters in the Wind, Boulley tells the story of Lucy Smith in relation to ICWA, the Indian Child Welfare Act, the law that is supposed to ensure that native children in the foster system are protected and not isolated from their tribal communities. When we meet Lucy, she is an 18 year old who has aged out of the foster system, working as a waitress at a diner in northern Michigan. She is approached by Mr. Jameson, a lawyer who helps young adults who may have Native American heritage reconnect with their families. She trusts no one, after having survived more than one difficult foster home. Something terrible happens, and she wakes up in the hospital, with Mr. Jameson and his friend Daunis Fontaine–they claim she is the sister of Daunis’s best friend Lily. But Lucy doesn’t want to hear about that. She just wants her broken leg to heal and to go back on the run so no one else will get hurt.
I highly recommend each of these books, though they will take you through an emotional journey! I will even consider them fat positive, as Daunis is described as a large woman, tall, with a “bubble butt”, and she is the best character–powerful, athletic, and fierce. There is some mild anti-fatness directed towards her, but Boulley doesn’t allow Daunis to internalize any of it, and in fact, I noted in Firekeeper’s Daughter that Daunis’s mother actually set a boundary with her own mother about mentioning Daunis’s weight. I listened to the other two books, and don’t recall any anti-fat bias in them at all. I read that Firekeeper’s Daughter is soon to be adapted for Netflix by the Obamas’ production company Higher Ground, and I can’t wait for this!
Reading While Fat 