Formative Years

Brian Thomas Isaac’s Bones of a Giant takes place during the summer of 1968 in Salmon Valley, British Columbia. It follows sixteen-year-old Lewis Toma and his mother, Grace, who are both reeling from the disappearance of Lewis’s older brother, Eddie. Readers of Isaac’s award-winning debut, All the Quiet Places, will recognize Eddie as that novel’s protagonist, who, in the aftermath of his girlfriend’s death, runs away in the final pages. Now Isaac resumes the story, shifting his focus to those the troubled boy left behind.

Money continues to be tight for the Toma family, but Grace is determined to finish the renovations on their home. With little financial help from the Indian agent, she decides to find work in the United States, leaving Lewis to live down the road with his Uncle Ned and cousins for a few months. Here Lewis can escape his past — his missing brother, the ramshackle state of his farm — and embrace modernity, where everything is “neat and orderly,” where the “old tin tub” is replaced by a shower, and where the “tinny noise” of his ancient radio is surpassed by his uncle’s record player. This stint is his chance to cross the threshold into a new period of adventure.

Along with societal change, hostility has made its way into Lewis’s new household. Their white neighbour, Norris, is strict about the boundaries of his land, those imaginary lines dreamt up when private property was invented. Yet when the same man barges into their home, “he didn’t bother to knock or wipe his feet.” Not even young love can escape violence in this seemingly idyllic environment. Lewis falls for Loretta, the daughter of another neighbour, but before they can lose their innocence together, it is taken from him. At a community dance, his Uncle Alphonse gets him drunk, and he is sexually assaulted by an older woman, Lily. What’s more, Lily is his estranged father’s girlfriend.

As obstacles are brought on by the stress of shifting times, nature becomes a refuge of peace and calm. The woods are sacred, as is the cemetery, where they can all connect, in different ways, to the history of their people through the discovery of arrowheads and the bones of long-dead chiefs. The Salmon River is a “place where a person could fish and never leave empty-handed.” When swimming in it, Lewis feels as if he has “fallen through the floor of one world and crashed through the ceiling of another.” The landscape is a reminder of what was lost but cannot be forgotten, a tether to what technological advancement erodes.

In a traditional bildungsroman, an adolescent protagonist, often shaped by emotional loss, sets out on a quest of maturation. The subsequent expedition sees him or her move from confusion to understanding, isolation to acceptance, or limitation to independence. It is a plot structure that hinges on a hopeful idea: internal struggle will yield growth. In the end, otherness becomes something to accept, understand, or possibly transcend. Lewis’s coming-of-age story, if it can be called that, charts not his progression away from self-alienation, however, but his endurance of a hostile culture. All he can do is learn to accept both the benefits and the pitfalls of his world without fully subscribing to them. In this way, Isaac gently critiques a Western concept, where maturity necessarily means mastery over one’s situation. In unadorned prose, he bends the narrative structure toward a different meaning: survival.

Where Bones of a Giant is artfully muted, Kyle Edwards’s Small Ceremonies is restless, raw, and ambitious. Set in Winnipeg’s North End during the 2011–12 school year, it follows an ensemble of hockey players, shelter kids, parents, and guardians. Unlike Isaac in his subtle modification of the coming-of-age form, Edwards departs from it entirely with a rotating chorus of narrators, epistolary chapters, and play-by-play broadcasts. The story’s arc collapses under the reality of the pressures of Indigenous life while still gesturing to the idea of hope — for character development, for a better life, or for a single, solitary win for the St. Croix Tigers.

At the centre are two teenage best friends, Clinton Whiteway and Tommy “Tomahawk” Shields. On the ice — a mystical realm in which their problems suddenly drop away — they have a clear goal: victory. It is an ostensibly trivial task, but the Tigers have gone so long without a win that no one can remember the last time they triumphed. “If they won just once,” thinks the rink caretaker, “you’d feel joy, the kind that feels earned and therefore more euphoric because you waited for it, and you’d feel a part of it, because it would belong to you too.”

The Tigers’ quest sets the stage for the novel. Not only do these two student-athletes have to deal with the typical barriers Indigenous youth face — generational trauma, systematic and internalized racism, drug use, poverty, and sexual abuse — they must also carry the hope of a community on their shoulders.

Hope is as dangerous as it is defiant, which is why Clinton says he’s “not sure” if he has it. Indeed, hope clashes with everything he knows. He has, for example, developed obsessive-compulsive rituals, stemming from a “dirty Indian” remark and a desire to never be viewed in that light again. His absent father is a recovering alcoholic whom he does not even recognize in a face-to-face encounter, while his mother is an active drug abuser who hasn’t been home in months. Even his older brother, Kelvin, who always made the best bannock, knew how to fix anything, and was the fastest kid in school, is now a drug-addicted “vampire.” Clinton realizes Kelvin has “officially been converted” when he “pulled back his sleeve one night to scratch his arm and there they were. The scabbed-over dots, like he’d recently donated blood.”

Tommy, on the other hand, has made a hopeful bet with Clinton for the semester: “I won’t be put on my ass. Not once. Like actually laid out, making snow angels.” This claim stems from the mythical “superpowers” he developed over the summer — puberty has finally caught up to him. Now muscled, tall, and referred to by most of his friends as Big Weapon, he aspires to finally live up to the name Tomahawk.

If only these characters lived in a fantasy where courage and perseverance yielded success. At the climax, when the Tigers seem destined to win and the two young heroes could be about to emerge from adolescence, hopes are dashed. A fight breaks out and the benches are cleared. St. Croix is up a goal, with less than a minute left, but the game is called off. Both teams lose. Victory slips away.

Then Edwards further upends our narrative expectations. As the pandemonium spills into the crowd, Kelvin squares off against a man in a trucker hat. Tensions rise, a gun is pulled, and Clinton attempts to intervene as it fires. The bleak scene culminates in an innocent woman being shot. A few pages later, Clinton dies at the hands of police, who mistake his pen for a weapon. The death is not framed as martyrdom, an exceptional tragedy, or an event that might spur political action. It is viewed as inevitable, which is why Tommy simply “went on with his life as if nothing had happened.”

Despite this devastating denouement, Edwards does craft the titular small ceremonies of survival throughout the novel. Tommy’s grandmother shelters Clinton; after a long struggle, his sister earns a Rhodes Scholarship; and his mother gets treated for schizophrenia in Vancouver. The cold reality of getting through hard times takes the place of a happy ending. The best these characters can hope for, as Tommy says, is the ambiguity of “waiting for whatever swims beneath to choose him.”

Bones of a Giant is restrained and quietly optimistic. Small Ceremonies, by contrast, portrays a community in free fall. Its emotional register is sharper, its perspectives more distinct and honest. Isaac’s novel refuses the wishfulness of Edwards’s, instead forcing the reader to confront the systemic conditions that make hope improbable. In both, the barriers the characters face are not bilateral — internal or external — but omnipresent and overwhelming.

Read together, these books offer a devastating portrait of coming of age in Canada, where growth can be achieved only with a series of fragile, defiant, and often futile steps. Their complex fictions remind us that Indigenous youth are not failed heroes but survivors of a world still struggling to make room for them — and in their survival, there is a profound, hard‑won grace.