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A Council of Dolls
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Isabella Star LaBlanc
- Length: 11 hrs and 15 mins
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Publisher's summary
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
The long-awaited, profoundly moving, and unforgettable new novel from PEN Award–winning Native American author Mona Susan Power, spanning three generations of Yanktonai Dakota women from the 19th century to the present day.
From the mid-century metropolis of Chicago to the windswept ancestral lands of the Dakota people, to the bleak and brutal Indian boarding schools, A Council of Dolls is the story of three women, told in part through the stories of the dolls they carried….
Sissy, born 1961: Sissy’s relationship with her beautiful and volatile mother is difficult, even dangerous, but her life is also filled with beautiful things, including a new Christmas present, a doll called Ethel. Ethel whispers advice and kindness in Sissy’s ear, and in one especially terrifying moment, maybe even saves Sissy’s life.
Lillian, born 1925: Born in her ancestral lands in a time of terrible change, Lillian clings to her sister, Blanche, and her doll, Mae. When the sisters are forced to attend an “Indian school” far from their home, Blanche refuses to be cowed by the school’s abusive nuns. But when tragedy strikes the sisters, the doll Mae finds her way to defend the girls.
Cora, born 1888: Though she was born into the brutal legacy of the “Indian Wars,” Cora isn’t afraid of the white men who remove her to a school across the country to be “civilized.” When teachers burn her beloved buckskin and beaded doll Winona, Cora discovers that the spirit of Winona may not be entirely lost…
A modern masterpiece, A Council of Dolls is gorgeous, quietly devastating, and ultimately hopeful, shining a light on the echoing damage wrought by Indian boarding schools, and the historical massacres of Indigenous people. With stunning prose, Mona Susan Power weaves a spell of love and healing that comes alive on the page.
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Bezellia Grove was born into the most prominent of Nashville families, but that didn’t stop her from having an alcoholic mother and a distant, adulterous father. Her nanny, Maizelle, and Nathaniel, the handyman, are the people who have taken care of her since she can remember. She considers them family, but her parents just consider them servants because they are Black. When Bezellia has a clandestine romance with Nathaniel's son, Whites and Blacks unite in fury at the young couple.
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light southern fiction
- By suzanne on 02-08-13
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Angel Sister
- A Novel
- By: Ann H. Gabhart
- Narrated by: Dianna Dorman
- Length: 13 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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It is 1936 and Kate Merritt works hard to keep her family together. Her father has slipped into alcoholism, her mother is trying to come to grips with their dire financial situation, and her sisters seem to remain blissfully oblivious to all of it. Kate could never have imagined that a dirty, abandoned little girl named Lorena Birdsong would be just what her family needs.
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Beautiful angel story
- By Kindle Customer on 02-24-24
By: Ann H. Gabhart
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Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All
- By: Laura Ruby
- Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan
- Length: 8 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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When Frankie’s mother died and her father left her and her siblings at an orphanage in Chicago, it was supposed to be only temporary - just long enough for him to get back on his feet and be able to provide for them once again. That’s why Frankie's not prepared for the day that he arrives for his weekend visit with a new woman on his arm and out-of-state train tickets in his pocket. Now, Frankie and her sister, Toni, are abandoned alongside so many other orphans - two young, unwanted women doing everything they can to survive.
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Boring, boring, boring
- By Marie J. on 08-20-21
By: Laura Ruby
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Above Us Only Sky
- By: Michele Young-Stone
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 9 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Prudence Eleanor Vilkas was born with a pair of wings molded to her back. Considered a birth defect, her wings were surgically removed, leaving only the ghost of them behind. Growing up in Los Vientos, Florida, Prudence meets her long-estranged Lithuanian grandfather and discovers a miraculous lineage beating and pulsing with past Lithuanian bird-women.
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I'm So Glad I Listened to It!
- By Elizabeth on 08-22-16
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The Plague of Doves
- By: Louise Erdrich
- Narrated by: Peter Francis James, Kathleen McInerney
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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The unsolved murder of a farm family haunts the small, white, off-reservation town of Pluto, North Dakota. The vengeance exacted for this crime and the subsequent distortions of truth transform the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation and shape the passions of both communities for the next generation.
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Avoid this Plague
- By Andre on 05-16-08
By: Louise Erdrich
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A Cup of Dust: A Novel of the Dust Bowl
- Pearl Spence Novels, Book 1
- By: Susie Finkbeiner
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Ten-year-old Pearl Spence is a daydreamer, playing make-believe to escape life in Oklahoma's Dust Bowl in 1935. The Spences have their share of misfortune, but as the sheriff's family, they've got more than most in this dry, desolate place. They're who the town turns to when there's a crisis or a need. Pearl is proud of her loving, strong family, though she often wearies of tracking down her mentally impaired older sister or wrestling with her grandmother's unshakable belief in a God. Then a mysterious man bent on revenge tramps into her town of Red River.
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Intense
- By VickyJ on 02-07-21
By: Susie Finkbeiner
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All the Winters After
- A Novel
- By: Seré Prince Halverson
- Narrated by: George Newbern
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Kachemak Winkel never intended to come back to his hometown of Caboose, Alaska, where his family died in a plane crash 20 years earlier. When he finally musters the courage to return and face his painful memories, he's surprised to find a mysterious young woman living in his abandoned house.
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The Old Old Story
- By Bruce on 06-16-16
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The Vine of Desire
- By: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
- Narrated by: Julia Whelan
- Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Anju and Sudha formed an astounding, almost psychic connection during their childhood in India. When Anju invites Sudha, a single mother in Calcutta, to come live with her and her husband, Sunil, in California, Sudha foolishly accepts, knowing full well that Sunil has long desired her. As Sunil's attraction rises to the surface, the trio must struggle to make sense of the freedoms of America - and of the ties that bind them to India and to one another.
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Vine of desire
- By Mz Shantay on 03-27-21
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The Girl from the Train
- By: Irma Joubert
- Narrated by: Sarah Zimmerman
- Length: 11 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Six-year-old Gretl Schmidt is on a train bound for Auschwitz. Jakób Kowalski is planting a bomb on the tracks. As World War II draws to a close, Jakób fights with the Polish resistance against the crushing forces of Germany and Russia. They mean to destroy a German troop transport, but Gretl's unscheduled train reaches the bomb first. Gretl is the only survivor.
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Excellent story covering the middle of the 20th C.
- By john on 04-12-16
By: Irma Joubert
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My Soul to Keep
- By: Tananarive Due
- Narrated by: Peter Francis James
- Length: 18 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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When Jessica marries David, he is everything she wants in a family man: brilliant, attentive, ever youthful. Yet she still feels something about him is just out of reach. Soon, as people close to Jessica begin to meet violent, mysterious deaths, David makes an unimaginable confession: More than 400 years ago, he and other members of an Ethiopian sect traded their humanity so they would never die, a secret he must protect at any cost.
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A Book I Can't Keep
- By Mistsofjade on 07-19-20
By: Tananarive Due
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A Phoenix First Must Burn
- Sixteen Stories of Black Girl Magic, Resistance, and Hope
- By: Patrice Caldwell - editor
- Narrated by: York Whitaker
- Length: 10 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Evoking Beyoncé’s Lemonade for a teen audience, these authors who are truly Octavia Butler’s heirs have woven worlds to create a stunning narrative that puts Black women and gender-nonconforming individuals at its center. A Phoenix First Must Burn will take you on a journey from folktales retold to futuristic societies and everything in between. Filled with stories of love and betrayal, strength and resistance, this collection contains an array of complex and true-to-life characters through which you cannot help but see yourself reflected.
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Absolutely brilliant
- By Ruthi on 03-11-20
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Ordinary Light
- A Memoir
- By: Tracy K. Smith
- Narrated by: Tracy K. Smith
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Tracy K. Smith has a fairly typical upbringing in suburban California: the youngest in a family of five children raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But after spending a summer in Alabama at her grandmother's home, she returns to California with a new sense of what it means for her to be Black: from her mother's memories of picking cotton as a girl in her father's field for pennies a bushel to her parents' involvement in the Civil Rights Movement.
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Simply spoken - poetic
- By CarolynneRHarris on 04-27-15
By: Tracy K. Smith
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Gripping & emotional & terrifying
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Welcome to Anoka, Minnesota, a small city just outside of the Twin Cities dubbed “The Halloween Capital of the World” since 1937. Here before you lie several tales involving bone collectors, pagan witches, werewolves, skeletal bison, and cloned children. It is up to you to decipher between fact and fiction as the author has woven historical facts into his narratives.
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Discover indigenous wisdom for a life well lived in "The Seven Generations and the Seven Grandfather Teachings." Based on ancient teachings from the Anishinaabe / Ojibwe people, this spiritual translation of the sacred laws guides us toward Mino-bimaadiziwin, "the good life" – a life of harmony, free from contradiction or conflict.
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Humanity has nearly destroyed its world through global warming, but now an even greater evil lurks. The indigenous people of North America are being hunted and harvested for their bone marrow, which carries the key to recovering something the rest of the population has lost: the ability to dream. In this dark world, Frenchie and his companions struggle to survive as they make their way up north to the old lands. For now, survival means staying hidden—but what they don't know is that one of them holds the secret to defeating the marrow thieves.
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Rosalie Iron Wing has grown up in the woods with her father, Ray, a former science teacher who tells her stories of plants, of the stars, of the origins of the Dakhota people. Until, one morning, Ray doesn't return from checking his traps. Told she has no family, Rosalie is sent to live with a foster family in nearby Mankato - where the reserved, bookish teenager meets rebellious Gaby Makespeace, in a friendship that transcends the damaged legacies they've inherited.
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Wonderful Timely Story
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Hangman
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A man returns home to sub-Saharan Africa after twenty-six years in America. When he arrives, he finds that he doesn’t recognize the country or anyone in it. Thankfully, someone recognizes him, a man who calls him brother—setting him on a quest to find his real brother, who is dying. In Hangman, Maya Binyam tells the story of that search, and of the phantoms, guides, tricksters, bureaucrats, debtors, taxi drivers, relatives, riddles, and strangers that will lead to the truth.
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A great read
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Night of the Living Rez
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Set in a Native community in Maine, Night of the Living Rez is a riveting debut collection about what it means to be Penobscot in the twenty-first century and what it means to live, to survive, and to persevere after tragedy.
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Powerful and Candid Story
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Indian Burial Ground
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All Noemi Broussard wanted was a fresh start. With a new boyfriend who actually treats her right and a plan to move from the reservation she grew up on—just like her beloved Uncle Louie before her—things are finally looking up for Noemi. Until the news of her boyfriend’s apparent suicide brings her world crumbling down. But the facts about Roddy’s death just don’t add up, and Noemi isn’t the only one who suspects that something menacing might be lurking within their tribal lands.
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Best book I’ve read this year
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What listeners say about A Council of Dolls
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- leeloo
- 10-26-23
a book i wish every 'american' would read
"English has it's grand beauty that I will always admire, but it also has its agenda."
Mona Susan Power
Mona Susan Power's transformational ability to tell the stories of the deeply woven histories of several generations of women who were sent to, or taken by boarding schools with the nuance of subtle and unspoken kindness, respect and dignity that seems a requirement to live through colonization, woven and tangled with the casualties of those who don't survive and those who do but whose spirits are ravaged and broken by it. She models real friendship - actual friendship - one that is not based on convenience, or transaction, perhaps from a mindset of scarcity but not greed; and the courage to carry on after worlds were burnt and beaten to nothing...This is a book i wish every 'american' would read. Although fiction, it is an historic document that reveals how things got to where we are, from the medical and pharma 'industries,' to public education, to ecologic crises - still extracted from, still perversely anthropocentric and perversely based in domination. Yet this nuance of kindness, respect and dignity prevails in the characters who have the courage to actually do some healing. No magical realism or spiritual bypassing here.
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- Lisa Dietz
- 01-10-24
Outstanding!
The writing is superb. The story is written in a unique way with many twists. The characters are interesting and deep.
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- Jessica
- 03-27-24
Captivating
A captivating story based on much of the author’s own family history- uniquely told through the eyes of the precious “toys” who provided comfort and companionship for the generations of young girls surviving cultural genocide
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- shannon
- 12-27-23
Healing generational trauma
Such a beautiful way to tell the stories of trauma and healing. Our innocent “toys” as witness and absorption of trauma. It was beautifully woven with the history of the Lakota and Dakota people in both the wonderful and the tragic.
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- Liza Michaelson
- 10-21-24
Valuable Perspective, told with gentleness
This is an important book, providing a unique window on generations of Native American girls through the experience of their dolls.
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- QueeneB21
- 11-16-23
Dolls and their Stories
Fascinating story of 3 Native American woman from different generations and the dolls who witness everything. It's not supernatural, just really good storytelling
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- Mikel
- 01-15-24
The brutal honesty
I loved this sad story. The inclusion of true historical events or themes. The expression of the traumas effects on the lives of the children made to go to far away “schools” and how it carried down the generations, still. The brutel theft & loss of their beings, culture and security.
Sad sad truth of it breaks my heart over and over again but I still can’t wait to share this novel with my friends and family. Thank you for sharing your families experiences, telling some of the true histories Indigenous peoples endured, and showing the humanity they carried (or tried to carry) with them thru their lives. And for including our languages, languages that are in jeopardy of being lost forever along with our cultures that were taken from us. Pinamaya 🪶🪶🦅🪶🪶
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- Melody Burdette
- 03-01-24
Unique perspective
A Council of Dolls by Mona Susan Power, narrated by Isabella Star LaBlanc. I loved the unique perspective of this multi-generational story, tenderly told through children and their dolls. Generational trauma starting in 1888 in the wake of the "Indian Wars" and forced assimilation by separating children from their parents and even each other in boarding schools and residential training to "civilize" them, removing them from their land, their people, their homes, their language, way of life, their religion - while treating them inhumanely, in so many horrendous ways. This story is told as a healing process in such a beautiful voice.
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- MLB
- 10-02-23
History, family, community, trauma, and hope
I learned a lot from this book. The ways the lives of people in these stories are captured - seeing who they were as adults first and the. Going backwards to understand factors that affected them - a very humane depiction of complicated characters. Understanding ourselves through our past and our generational history is at the foundation of this book.
Highly engaging read.
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- all our stories
- 11-30-23
More than five stars
A beautifully written story that weaves together fiction and the rich threads of First Nations history and culture. A creative way of sharing the truths of trauma. I couldn’t stop listening to this book. I hope to read more of this gifted and powerful writer’s work. I will need to purchase a hard copy of this book to add to my personal library.
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