Sisters in the Wind
by Angeline Boulley
High School    Holt    384 pp.
9/25    9781250328533    $19.99
e-book ed.  9781250328540    $11.99

Lucy Smith knows that someone is following her, and she decides it’s time to leave town. At first she suspects the handsome Potawatomi man who insists on talking to her at the Michigan diner where she works, but it turns out the man—who introduces himself as John Jameson, a lawyer who helps Native children who were in foster care find their communities—has only been in town for two days, and can’t be the culprit. Then someone bombs the diner, and Lucy’s resulting broken leg needs to heal before she can leave. While in the hospital, she is introduced to Mr. Jameson’s friend Daunis Fontaine (the protagonist of Firekeeper’s Daughter, rev. 5/21), who claims to know Lucy’s biological mother and her late sister, both Ojibwe. Lucy is forced to think about why her father wouldn’t talk about her mother when he was alive and what it means to be Native when she grew up being told she was white. Boulley (Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians) tells a powerful story about the importance of the Indian Child Welfare Act, which aims to ensure that Native children in foster care are placed with Native families. Lucy’s story is related in chapters that alternate between her present (in 2009, between the events of Firekeeper’s Daughter and Warrior Girl Unearthed, rev. 5/23) and her past. Slowly unfolding, sometimes shocking revelations keep pages turning. Boulley’s latest gripping thriller poignantly expands familiar characters’ stories and introduces a compelling new heroine.

From the September/October 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.