Funeral Song For Dying Girls

 by Sophia Chen

Funeral Songs for Dying Girls is a book by Métis author Cherie Dimaline about a girl living in a cemetery who is in love with her childhood best friend and finds out ghosts are real.

It sounds incredibly cliché, I know. I thought so too, when I first picked it up off the shelf a week or two ago. But the cover was irresistibly interesting, and the last line of the blurb -- "But when Phil, an actual ghost of a teen girl who lived and died in the ravine next to the cemetery, starts showing up, Winifred begins to question everything she believes about life, love and death. Especially love" -- caught me so off-guard that I knew I had to read the book to find out what was going on there. It's safe to say I didn't regret that decision.

Firstly, Funeral Songs for Dying Girls is an excellent read, just in terms of prose. I've never read one of Dimaline's books before, but this book made me want to check out more of them. The dialogue was funny but also realistic but also impactful, the descriptions were vivid but also strangely nostalgic, and I really just enjoyed the vibe of the narration.

Also, Funeral Songs incorporates many different, relatively heavy themes that you wouldn't expect just from reading the blurb, but somehow it doesn't feel like it's trying to do too much. Sometimes with intersectionality you get the feeling that the author really is buying into the diversity sells business (which is a topic for another day), but I felt that in this book, it only served to round out the main character more. Partly I believe that this is due to the author drawing on her own lived experiences as an indigenous author who is possibly queer as well (?) (I was unable to dredge that information up from the internet, at least from any credible sources, which is fine).

Winifred's (that's the main character) relationship to her indigenous heritage was especially interesting to me. Because her father is white and her mother is dead, she seems to deeply desire a strong connection to her heritage, which is difficult to maintain when you don't actively live within a majority indigenous community. (And don't I relate to that, as a young immigrant.) It's especially complicated because the surviving members of the Métis side of her family are either extremely bad influences when it comes to lifestyle choices, or they hold a deep grudge against Winifred's father because of his whiteness. This results in her being torn between two sides almost, which I believe is a common experience for multi-cultural people in general. So I related to that, and it also taught me a lot about the lived experience of a person who has access to both sides of the family but finds it difficult to reconcile them (which is not my experience at all).

The second storyline that interested me greatly was Winifred's love life. Naturally, it is a main focus of the book, but I believe it takes having lived the queer experience to actually understand her love story's arc to the fullest (or just being very critical in your reading, I guess) because compulsory heterosexuality, in my opinion, is something very few cishet people actually understand (even some queer people who haven't experienced it struggle to understand it fully as well, I think). I can't spoil the plot, though, so you will have to read it yourself with the knowledge that comphet definitely is a thing and it definitely is relevant to this book.

I also enjoyed the presence of the dog. I was very saddened at his death.

I will end this review with the caveat that this book's plot is largely... bad. What I really enjoyed about Funeral Songs were the characterizations and the relationship dynamics. Yes, there is a plot, or at least an attempt at one, but generally I found that it kind of seemed like it was going nowhere, and I really hated the way the book ended (again, I won't spoil it, but I'll just say that it's something akin to what happened at the end of If I Ever Get Out of Here). But since I'm not really someone who cares about plots in general, ever (I much prefer analyzing characters' motivations and relationships), this wasn't a deal-breaker.

Overall, this was an unexpectedly great book that was easy to read and taught me a lot. Highly recommend to anyone who feels similarly about the whole plot vs. character debate, as well as anyone who wants to read more books dealing with intersectionality in an actually good and thoughtful way.