Ida Florence Little Shay is orphaned as a teen. When she is sent to watch over young girls at a boarding school, Ida Florence is determined to make a better life for herself. However, her decisions along with the current state of the world lead her right back into the situation she came from. Fawn Breen has only ever known the small mud hut that she and her father live in, raising goats and foraging nearby. Once Sidney Breen finds Fawn in the woods, Fawn life changes forever. Harold Peavy can't catch a break since he made a decision in line with his morals. Forced into a life he didn't choose, Harold tries to make the best of what he has been given in the small town of Prophetstown, North Dakota.

True North follows the stories of three interconnected families living along the Canadian Border and the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation in North Dakota from the 1930's through the 1960's. The time period and landscape offer a bleak landscape and outlook for the people of Prophetstown. Poverty, racism, and war defined these time periods for the people of Prophetstown. The writing carried a long story over several decades at a good pace. Each family had their own method of survival and holding on to hope. The characters were all bound together by tragedy and sorrow. Some of them used this bond to overcome while some became stuck in their suffering. Each character was written very real, raw and gritty. I wanted to know their stories and was carried through their journeys with each misfortune, setback and trial that they faced.

This book was received for free in return for an honest review. ( )

The book starts with three young unmarried pregnant girls in a small area in rural North Dakota. The entirety of the book takes place between the 1930s and 1960s. All three girls eventually all end up married and they are “related” in some way. There are feuding neighbours in the mix, and a nearby Indian reservation.

The girls: Fawn was raised by her father, extremely isolated, and had never met any other human until shortly before she became pregnant. Ida Florence – I can’t remember her circumstances at the start of the book. Leah liked a nearby boy (one of the indigenous people, I think), but her father did not. Her father was pushing for an unmarried older man, Harold, to marry Leah after she got pregnant.

There are a lot of characters and I (sometimes) found it difficult to either remember who was who and/or who was related to whom in what way(s). It took a long time for me to figure out that these three pregnant girls were not of the same generation. Similarly, I sometimes found it difficult to remember which characters were indigenous or not. There were very few likable characters. All that being said about the numerous characters, the story itself ended up being ok, but it took a while at the start to get “into” it. ( )

It took me three tries to get into this book. I just couldn't get past Ida Mae's story in the beginning. Once we got to Fawn, I got pulled in, and I finished the book.

There were many fascinating and tragic characters in this book. There were also a lot of deplorable characters, mostly men, who were drawn very convincingly as inherently evil. There were themes of abandonment, loss, sexual abuse, physical abuse, incest, poverty, mental illness and a lot of murder.

Despite all of the content, I'm not really sure what this book was supposed to be about. We meet a lot of characters - all connected in one way or another - but there isn't a cohesive story to the book. A lot of people suffer and a lot of people die. At the end we are left with one character who is left half-finished and an open-ended question as to what his future would be. Frankly, amongst all the characters, he was not a compelling one, and I would have rather seen several other characters survive and be the ones to close the book.

Eller really tried with this book, but in the end it was a mess, and I felt like I spent a lot of time reading something only for it not to really have an ending. I would not recommend this book. ( )

I received a pre-publication copy of this book as part of Library Thing's Early Reviewer Program.
This book follows three generations of 4 families in North Dakota. Historical time and place are not directly referenced and need to be gleaned from textual references. This made the first few chapters of the book somewhat confusing. Reading through with few breaks made it easier to remember the characters as the book progressed and their relationships were fleshed out, and as the cultural references were more familiar to me. The writer successfully captured realistic every-day situations and emotions of the very different but entangled families. Overall, the book paints a bleak but believable picture of life near the Canadian border throughout the 20th century. ( )

Gritty and sad. Be prepared for vivid living conditions of Indians, side by side with a white culture during and after the depression. It emphasises all the negative aspects of racism. Finding love in all the wrong places is a natural occurrence and its results are as expected. As we read we are flooded with the work ethic of the Indians which I find to be exaggerated although the living conditions have a hint of truth to it. ( )