Red River Girl
The Life and Death of Tina Fontaine
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Red River Girl
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Narrated by:
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Penelope Rawlins
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By:
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Joanna Jolly
National best seller
A gripping account of the unsolved death of an Indigenous teenager, and the detective determined to find her killer, set against the backdrop of a troubled city.
On August 17, 2014, the body of 15-year old runaway Tina Fontaine was found in Winnipeg's Red River. It was wrapped in material and weighted down with rocks. Red River Girl is a gripping account of that murder investigation and the unusual police detective who pursued the killer with every legal means at his disposal. The audiobook, like the movie Spotlight, chronicles the behind-the-scenes stages of a lengthy and meticulously planned investigation. It reveals characters and social tensions that bring vivid life to a story that made national headlines.
Award-winning BBC reporter and documentary maker Joanna Jolly delves into the troubled life of Tina Fontaine, the half-Ojibway, half-Cree murder victim, starting with her childhood on the Sagkeeng First Nation Reserve. Tina's journey to the capital city is a harrowing one, culminating in drug abuse, sexual exploitation, and death.
Aware of the reality of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, Jolly has chronicled Tina Fontaine's life as a reminder that she was more than a statistic. Raised by her father, and then by her great-aunt, Tina was a good student. But the violent death of her father hit Tina hard. She ran away, was found and put into the care of Child and Family Services, which she also sought to escape from. That choice left her in danger.
Red River Girl focuses not on the grisly event itself, but on the efforts to seek justice. In December 2015, the police charged Raymond Cormier, a drifter, with second-degree murder. Jolly's audiobook will cover the trial, which resulted in an acquittal. The verdict caused dismay across the country.
The audiobook is not only a true crime story, but a portrait of a community where Indigenous women are disproportionately more likely to be hurt or killed. Jolly asks questions about how Indigenous women, sex workers, community leaders, and activists are fighting back to protect themselves and change perceptions. Most importantly, the audiobook will chronicle whether Tina's family will find justice.
©2019 Joanna Jolly (P)2019 VikingListeners also enjoyed...
Critic reviews
"Tina Fontaine brought international attention to the tragedy of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit folks. This retelling of her life and the investigation into her death is a breathtaking account of the fight to find justice for Tina." (Wab Kinew, leader of the Manitoba NDP and author of The Reason You Walk)
Bittersweet initiative to the MMIW movement
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First of all, as a true crime story, it's thin. A parade of potential suspects is perfunctory at best, as it quickly becomes apparent who is in the crosshairs of the police. But, still, fair enough, we don't need to manufacture a mystery... the dogged tracking of a killer could be interesting. But it's not. What we are given are accounts of incompetent, and later grossly unethical, police work. All this while the author is firmly supportive of the police. A more critical look at the police, their skills, and motivation to solve the crime, may have made the story more engrossing.
And secondly (and in my opinion FAR more importantly), as an effort for social justice, I expected a much more comprehensive look into the atrocity of the treatment of native peoples, particularly the exploitation and murder of young Indigenous women. Outside of a few points of quoted statistics, the briefest of colonial histories and a procession of governmental promises, including ones by a then-incoming Justin Trudeau-led government (good luck with that), there is very little in the way of urgency for seeking justice. (The author found considerable time to spend on the significance of a duvet cover, however, in the true crime part of the story.) It just feels that Tina Fontaine was not well served by a book written ostensibly to speak for her.
Finally, I'm rarely critical of narrators, as it is a difficult job, and frankly it's not that hard for the listener to get past minor annoyances. However, when quoted speech is necessary, it would be best if the narrator could either... a) read in their own voice and allow that the writing is precise enough that the listener can understand who is speaking, or... b) adequately speak in voices, particularly across gender, which are not cartoonish, e.g. the Python-esque crone of men speaking women's words or the "dumb guy" voice of female readers doing men's (usually criminals) voices. A British voice narrating a book by a British author is all well and good, but perhaps a Canadian, or even more exactly a First Nations, narrator may have more convincingly conveyed the idea that the book was about the subject, Tina Fontaine and her murder, rather than the author herself.
Sadly, fails to deliver on promises
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