Five Little Indians

Review: 4 stars

This was Tanya's pick for my university girls' book club, which we read last fall, and the timing finally feels right to write about it: September 30 is the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation in Canada, and this is the book I would press into every Canadian's hands this week.

It was an extremely difficult read. I was born and raised in Vancouver, and growing up I spent a lot of time in Chinatown, trailing my parents as they picked up fresh vegetables and meat for the restaurant they ran. We always passed through the Downtown Eastside to get there. My pediatrician was at 475 Main Street, which on a recent visit home, I found lined with tents and makeshift shelters. It has always been a hard area to look at directly. But reading the stories of Kenny, Lucy, Clara, Howie, and Maisie, five residential school survivors trying to stay alive in that same neighborhood, changed the way I pass through it - with less prejudice and caution, and more curiosity. The book asked me to see individuals, not masses.

The book reminded me of A Little Life, one of my favorite novels, in the way Michelle Good is unrelenting about lived experience in all its harshness. No softening, no looking away: the bleakness, the compounding trauma, the way a person's history quietly sets the ceiling on what they believe they're allowed to be. Maisie's story was the hardest to sit with, the brutality of it, how completely her sense of self and reality had been warped by the schools. All five of them grew so accustomed to loss, to people leaving without warning, to nobody being on their side, that doing something as ordinary as living a normal life required them to be almost extraordinary.

It also left me humbled by how little I knew, and honest about something uncomfortable: I don't know how to teach my own children about this yet. The brutality makes it hard. You want them to understand how much they have compared to the children who were taken, and the comparison is so jarring it barely feels shareable. That's not a reason to look away, but it is a real tension I sat with.

My favorite arc was Clara's: surviving, finding her roots, returning to her community without apology to serve it and lift it up, and finally arriving at her own quiet life. It sounds like such a simple list of wants. Community, support, love, living into your forties and fifties. But nothing on that list can be taken for granted in a community with this heritage of abuse, this history of having identity stripped away. Clara earning the ordinary felt like the most radical ending in the book.

I highly recommend it to Canadians, especially right now. And take it slowly. Don't rush through it. Sit with what it means to be Canadian, a country built on the shoulders of this past.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Review: 5 stars

Omar El Akkad’s latest non-fiction book examines power, violence, and the language used to describe them, with significant attention to Gaza. Drawing on journalism, history, and personal reflection, the book considers what responsibility remains for those who witness events from a distance.

In particular, when the author takes a more journalistic and rhetorical lens on the genocide in Gaza, he makes a poignant point about the truths of the violence that occurred and who the victims were. What is undebatable is that lives were snatched too early, rendered collateral damage in the ongoing theatre of revenge. “When the past is past, the dead will be found to not have partaken in their own killing. The children will not have pulled their own limbs out and strewn them all over the makeshift soccer pitch.”

El Akkad fixates at length on the role of language in covering this conflict—the contortions Western media goes through to avoid blame, to preserve a veneer of objectivity, while failing what he argues is journalism’s moral mandate: to report facts. “Accidentally, a stray bullet found its way into the van ahead, and that killed a three- or four-year-old young lady,”reported by a British newscaster, is a sobering example of how traditional media cannot bring itself to speak forthrightly about a toddler being murdered at a military checkpoint.

I do not come to this book as an expert. My understanding of Israel–Palestine largely stops at high school history, and I would not claim intimacy with the full scope of events since October 7, 2023. What unsettled me most about El Akkad’s writing was not simply what I learned, but what it revealed about the narrowness of the viewpoints I tend to encounter. I am often spoon-fed stories from Facebook, YouTube, and other social media algorithms that quietly reinforce what I already believe - or think I know.. When I linger too long on a video or a post, those moments are already reshaping what my scrolling will reveal next, and I often find myself snapping back to what is safe, known, and accepted.

In the true spirit of setting New Year’s resolutions, I found myself wondering what El Akkad’s call to action might be in the face of such pain. His concept of “negative resistance” was particularly compelling—almost a foot-in-the-door path for bystanders who want to do more but are scared to start. He defines it as “refusing to participate when the act of participation falls below one’s moral threshold,” including seemingly small acts such as changing which businesses we consume from or refusing to attend certain events. It struck me as a practice many people with strong moral compasses already exercise: the deliberate introduction of friction into one’s life, a willingness to inconvenience oneself in the service of something larger.

I am grateful that I read this book as my first of 2026. It was an abrupt reminder to question what I see and hear, and to intentionally seek out divergent perspectives in order to understand any situation more honestly. I exercise this instinct readily in my professional life, but my capacity for active curiosity in my personal life has likely atrophied. In its place, another muscle has likely grown stronger: indifference. Perhaps this is true for many of us, conditioned by COVID, by constant crisis, by the daily shocks of modern news. As El Akkad writes, “No atrocity is too great to shrug away now, the muscles of indifference having been sufficiently conditioned.” This book does not allow us to shrug.