About The Book

A haunting debut novel where dreams, family, and spirits collide.

Night after night, Mackenzie - a young Cree woman living in Vancouver - has dreams that return her to a memory from before her sister Sabrina’s untimely death. But when the waking world starts closing in, too - crows stalk her every move around the city; she gets threatening text messages from someone claiming to be Sabrina - Mackenzie knows this is more than she can handle alone.

Desperate for help, she returns to her mother, sister, cousin, and aunties in her small Alberta hometown. Together, they try to uncover what is haunting Mackenzie before it’s too late.

Why We Love It

"Before I look down, I know it's there. The crow's head I was clutching in my dream is now in bed with me".

With a sucker-punch opening line like that, Bad Cree is one of those books that just grabs you from the first page. 

I'm a big fan of books that weave traditional folklore and mythology into contemporary settings and this supernatural fantasy, centred on Cree legend and language, is a uniquely engrossing read.

The book begins with Mackenzie, a young Cree woman, awakening from the first in a series of intensely vivid and unsettling dreams, in which the boundaries between reality and the dream world become increasingly unclear.

Followed by crows during the day and haunted by dreams at night, the story tracks Mackenzie as she returns to her family home in Alberta in search of answers.

During her stay, she gradually learns more about her Cree heritage, the secrets held by the women of her family and the eerie truth behind her sister's unexpected death a year earlier.

The book is heavily character-driven, with the strong generational bonds between Mackenzie, her sisters, mothers, and aunts adding so much depth of emotion to the novel. 

In some ways, the book reminded me a little of both Summer Fishing in Lapland by Juhani Karila and The Watchers by A.M. Shine, two books we've featured previously. Although entirely different in subject and style, all three books share a profound connection to the landscape they’re set in, it's people and their stories.

Bad Cree couldn’t possibly be set anywhere else, nor could it have been written by anyone other than Jessica Johns - this distinctiveness is exactly what we love about it.

A unique and haunting debut novel that we're thoroughly recommending!

Find it here