Stories for a Lost Child by Carter Meland (review)

carter meland's debut novel, Stories for a Lost Child, gracefully braids the experiences of a teenage girl, Fiona, with the writings sent to her from a person who claims to be her grandfather. Arriving in a mysterious box, the stories land in Fiona's hands eighteen years after what appears to be her Anishinaabe grandfather Robinson Heroux's disappearance into a swamp in northern Minnesota. Fiona is invited into the worlds her grandfather imagines and reveals for her, ranging from letters addressed to "the grandchild" to stories about Bigfoot, Indians in space, black holes, and addiction and poverty in Native Minneapolis. Swirling around the stories is Fiona's real-time experience of division and silence between her mother and grandmother and their relationships with Robinson. And all of this occurs one summer as Fiona is finding her way among not only her three best friends—Strep, Dane, and Chance—but also her own questions about her family's history and secrecy.

But simply synthesizing Meland's storyline does a disservice to the ambition of this novel. It is a story about stories: "You are here among these trees as well, noozis, down here with Misaabe and me," says Robinson to his imagined granddaughter. "I call you here with my words. I see you as I write. … These woods don't separate us from the world is what I'm trying to convey here, nor do these stories I share with you. They are a place where things come together, but not always in ways that others would recognize as harmonious" (50). Meland's novel pays attention to those strands of story that, indeed, create "a place where things come together," where meaning is made through long-tenured experience with the land and all that relates to it. Especially prescient, Fiona's grandfather writes later that "it's easier for most people to pretend things are divided rather than connected" (50). For Fiona, the stories become the conduits of truth about her past and about what it means to be descended from Anishinaabe peoples.

Meland demonstrates special attention to setting in this novel and illustrates just how important place is not only for Anishinaabeg generations ago but equally for Fiona navigating the lessons her grandfather bequeaths to her. In an exchange with her friend Chance, Fiona relays to him what she has been learning from her grandfather: "He told me that our ancestors remember we're Anishinaabe, even if we don't always remember what that means" (109). Fiona begins to tune herself to Indigenous guidance, wherever it can be found, and that fills her "with a new feeling, one she couldn't [yet] name" (128), one of light and certainty. In that moment, I can't help but think that Meland also talks directly to his reader: we are all lost without the revelation of land-based knowledge.

In line with a legacy of important Anishinaabeg writers such as Gerald Vizenor, Gordon Henry, Kimberly Blaeser, and others, Meland writes as someone who honors the medicine found in stories and believes deeply in how each of us is made of them. In fact, Meland seems to suggest that stories, as core truths, will be the way in which the planet and all her occupants will ensure a future. Stories for a Lost Child illustrates twenty-first-century Native peoples leaning into the warmth of Indigenous connection across generations, across time and space, and across relations. In a moving, funny, lyrical, and resonant first novel, Meland does not disappoint.