The Removed

This novel combines Cherokee folklore, history and contemporary issues facing a Native American family. It has been 15 years since Rae-Rae, Maria and Ernest’s son has been killed in a police shooting. The police shot the wrong man but, as often happens, they chose to shoot the alleged culprit with the darker skin.

Every year since Rae Rae’s death, Maria has a bonfire to celebrate family love and Rae Rae’s memory. The family is hovering on the brink of despair. Ernest has Alzheimer’s and is quickly descending into a dark place where his memory has no purchase. Rae Rae’s younger brother Edgar is a prisoner of drug addiction and finds himself stuck in a place known as The Darkening Land. His girlfriend has left him and he has not seen his them in months. He is not sure whether he will attend the bonfire. Sonja is 37 and still single. From time to time, she finds herself fixated on certain men but she finds none of them good enough for a sustained relationship.

The novel ingeniously melds the present, past, oral history, and mythology of the Cherokee people with their current isolation and poverty on their reservation. I found the timeline difficult to follow in the beginning but it merged together as the book progressed. In a sense, it is a novel of magical realism that borrows from other genres to make a beautiful sculpture of a people, place and land in the present and from the past.

This story about the far reaching effects of a murdered child and ethnic cleansing is told from multiple perspectives. It is a testament to Mr. Hobson’s skill that whatever point of view the story was being told from was obvious in the telling, the differences in character perception and behavior. Multiple perspectives can often be confusing. Each of the characters telling the story is different, just as the way every person deals with grief and loss and the aftermath of being raised by parents in grief, experiencing loss. The murder of a Cherokee boy by someone who is supposed to uphold the law and who never faces consequences or tried to make amends would devastate any family. This trauma is compounded by the historical trauma of an entire tribe that experienced genocide and ethnic cleansing and was illegally removed by the people who should have upheld the law. I, particularly, liked the portrayal of the character Sonja, a woman who does not feel incomplete without a male partner, who enjoys her solitude in a way women are rarely allowed to in society or on the page.

Short and spooky. You too may be haunted by the end. A showcase of a family’s journey through life, death, and everything beyond and between.

Im not going to be able to forget this book Its beautiful.

The Removed by Brandon Hobson is a story of grief, of family, of love, and of history. Every year on September 6th the Echota family marks both the day their eldest son Ray-Ray died, and the national Cherokee holiday with a bonfire and a meal together. Ray-Ray died 15 years earlier by police shooting, and since that day the family has dealt with their grief in different ways. Maria, the mother, journals and reads stories to children, and tries to keep her family together, while watching her husband deal with the onset of Alzheimers that has caused memory loss and confusion. Sonja, their eldest child, lives in solitude, obsessing over men a lot younger than her who always disappoint her, and Edgar, the youngest son has fallen into a life of drugs in order to separate himself from his grief and guilt.

The characters, as well as another, the spirit Tsala, narrate their own stories in the days leading up to the annual bonfire. Maria welcomes the temporary placement of a foster child named Wyatt in their home, amazed by how he seems to channel the spirit of Ray-Ray, and helps Ernest in ways that no medication has been able to. Sonja talks of her obsession with Vin, and of her solitude, Edgar of his descent into darkness and how he climbs out through it, and Tsala of the brutality of the Trail of Tears.

The narrative is beautiful, weaving reality and dream together, where Cherokee spirits and folklore are intimately entwined with the reality of the present day. There are so many connections within the narratives, and while the family seems to manage their grief in different, separate ways, they are all held together by communal trauma and healing. I dont actually think my review can do justice to just how special and important this story is.

(Side note: anyone who references Bauhaus is a hero in my world).

This is a very fractured narrative, theoretically exploring the pain of a Native American family whose son was shot and killed by the police, but with a distance of 15 years from that event and minimal overt connections across the four protagonist POVs, which stymies the effect for me as a reader. The most emotionally grounded storyline is that of the mother watching as a new foster child seems to improve her husband’s slip into Alzheimer’s, but their surviving son and daughter are varying degrees of uncomfortable to witness — he’s a drug addict caught up in a weird magical realist journey after a suicide attempt; she’s a sex-obsessed stalker who both experiences and perpetrates domestic abuse. All have complicated relationships to the past, but do not share meaningful interactions with one another in the present.

The final narrator is a Cherokee folk hero whose tales are sometimes referenced by the other characters, and his chapters offer a hazily poetic blend of myth and memory that leads to a few striking vignettes but again doesn’t tie back much to any larger plot. The whole venture is clearly rooted in #ownvoices experience and history, and when I posted on Goodreads that I was struggling to get into the book, author Brandon Hobson sent me a message saying, “Sorry you’re not liking it. It began out of thinking about violence against Natives and dealing with trauma.” And that comes through in the finished draft, but it’s overall more disjointed and lacking in resolution than I would prefer in a novel.

[Content warning for racism, pedophilia, sexual assault, and homophobic slurs.]