Monkey Beach Summary

Monkey Beach Overview

In Monkey Beach by Eden Robinson, high school student and first-person narrator Lisamarie Hill traverses the foggy, oceanic landscape surrounding Kitamaat, British Columbia in a search for her younger brother who has gone missing at sea. Part coming-of-age tale, part postcolonial critique of the white-settler project in Canada, Robinson constructs a narrative brimming with family love, trauma, and mythology set in the Haisla nation where the author's father was born. Robinson deftly weaves in the themes of colonialism, disintegration and adaptation, stereotypes of Indigenous spirituality, gendered and racialized violence, and treatment of the landscape as a character.