Harvest House

[cornerofmadness]

Harvest House by Cynthia Leitich Smith

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I wanted to rate this one higher as I liked Hughie, Sam, Rain, Marie and Cricket but 3.5 stars was about as high as I could go. I think for me it was how the focus of the book was done. Very obviously Smith wanted to shine a light on two interrelated things, the insanely high rate of missing/murdered Indigenous women and racial bias/racism. Unfortunately it leaned harder into the latter which I think might be because of the intended audience. Don't get me wrong, it's a needed thing but it split the focus of the book.

For me if it had focused on both more evenly the book would have been more successful in its message. Hughie and Rain are Indigenous (Sam and Marie are Latinx and Cricket is White). Hughie is a gifted actor at a Kansas h.s. that just slashed drama so his new friend Sam gets him into Harvest House, a haunted house for one of his mom's friend's crowdfunding attempt to pay off serious medical bills.

Harvest House is set in an old abandoned home next to a failed chicken restaurant (also abandoned) and the Grub and Pub where the girls work. At this crossroads where there's a legend of a Crossroads Ghost featuring (uncomfortably for Hughie) the ghost of an "Indian Maiden" (What no one knows at first that Celeste was a real Indigenous woman who went missing in the 80s which killed my heart a little since the kids were that is SO long ago and that's when I was there age...)

So naturally the lady running the attraction (white) and the owner of the Grub & Pub (also white) decide to capitalize on that legend. Just one of them would have been enough to show a YA audience how cultural appropriation hurts but it gets double hammered here and much more so with Ms Fisher running the attraction because she has an Indian graveyard complete with Indian braves (she wanted Hughie and Sam to play a role in that but didn't think they were dark enough, yikes) and the Maidens ghost. She doesn't see this as racist and kids are too sensitive these days (cringe, especially since she'd be my age and yes I've heard that said a lot). Not even when the two bully characters write offensive "Indian" names on the tombstones.

Eventually she and Hughie have it out and mild spoiler here, she comes to an understanding how hurtful this is. I only wish it didn't take a month to get to this because it ended up short shirting the rest of the novel which I think is just as important (But honestly less likely to be something teens can help with. They can modify their behavior but they can't take on a multi jurisidictional nightmare)

Because the other main theme here is Celeste's story. Cricket (school journalist) and Hughie and Rain (motivated Indigenous teens) want to know the real story of what happened, especially when they learn yes someone really did go missing here. In the US and Canada the rates of Indigenous women going missing or being murdered is 6 times the national rate. In less than a decade nearly 6000 Indigenous women have gone missing. The hashtag MMIW is used in social media for this and I truly did want more out of the novel in this respect. It's obvious it wanted to shine a light on this but it didn't do it fully, a bit more concerned with appropriating cultural and colonialism (again maybe because it's seeking to make changes where it's easiest?)

I did like the story. I just wanted more out of it.



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