A work that blends realism and fantasy, Bone Dance uses the material world to ground explorations of the spirit world. It opens emphatically in the middle: "In the middle of the night, in the middle of [Alex's] eleventh-grade year, in the middle of Manitoba's coldest winter for a century. . . ."The middle is a good place from which to make connections. Both Lonny and Alex have visions. Alex's stem from the death of her beloved Cree grandfather. Lonny is visited by his mother's spirit. Brooks refuses to exaggerate or embellish the spiritual element of the visions: Alex has one vision while standing in the middle of Harmony Drugs, holding a box of tampons and a bottle of hair spray. Her grandfather is wearing his Tansi lumber cap along with his caribou skins. This mixing of the material and the spirit worlds lends credence to the book's spirituality.

The novel...