'Split Tooth' by Tanya Tagaq is a genre-defying book that delves into the raw and brutal experiences of a young Inuit girl growing up in the far north. The story is a blend of coming-of-age narrative, magical realism, and poetry, exploring themes of abuse, violence, and the harsh realities of life in the Arctic. The writing style is described as visceral, electric, and haunting, with scenes that seamlessly shift between the mundane and the mythical, blurring the lines between reality and fantasy.
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Sensitive Topics/Content Warnings
Content warnings include sexual abuse, alcoholism, violence, and themes of trauma, making it potentially distressing for some readers.
From The Publisher:
Longlisted for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize
Shortlisted for the 2019 Amazon First Novel Award
Shortlisted for the 2019 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize
Winner of the 2019 Indigenous Voices Award for Published Prose in English
Winner of the 2018 Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design - Prose Fiction
Longlisted for the 2019 Sunburst Award
From the internationally acclaimed Inuit throat singer who has dazzled and enthralled the world with music it had never heard before, a fierce, tender, heartbreaking story unlike anything you've ever read.
Fact can be as strange as fiction. It can also be as dark, as violent, as rapturous. In the end, there may be no difference between them.
A girl grows up in Nunavut in the 1970s. She knows joy, and friendship, and parents' love. She knows boredom, and listlessness, and bullying. She knows the tedium of the everyday world, and the raw, amoral power of the ice and sky, the seductive energy of the animal world. She knows the ravages of alcohol, and violence at the hands of those she should be able to trust. She sees the spirits that surround her, and the immense power that dwarfs all of us.
When she becomes pregnant, she must navigate all this.
Veering back and forth between the grittiest features of a small arctic town, the electrifying proximity of the world of animals, and ravishing world of myth, Tanya Tagaq explores a world where the distinctions between good and evil, animal and human, victim and transgressor, real and imagined lose their meaning, but the guiding power of love remains.
Haunting, brooding, exhilarating, and tender all at once, Tagaq moves effortlessly between fiction and memoir, myth and reality, poetry and prose, and conjures a world and a heroine readers will never forget.
Ratings (6)
Incredible (1) | |
Loved It (1) | |
Liked It (1) | |
Did Not Like (1) | |
Hated It (2) |
Reader Stats (38):
Read It (6) | |
Want To Read (28) | |
Not Interested (4) |
1 comment(s)
I appreciated reading a completely different perspective and culture, but was hard for me to understand. I don't know if the narrative was fiction, non-fiction, or both.
What can you read after
Split Tooth?
About the Author:
TANYA TAGAQ is an improvisational performer, avant-garde composer, and experimental recording artist who won the 2014 Polaris Music Prize for her album Animism, a work that disrupted the music world in Canada and beyond with its powerfully original vision. Tagaq…
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