Red Rooms

By Cherie Dimaline

Book Overview

Naomi, an Indigenous chambermaid in a busy downtown hotel, amuses herself by imagining the past, present and future lives of five hotel guests, whom she observed in passing, in the hotel lobby and through relics left in their rooms. Struck by their remains, their footprints and their clues, Naomi patches them together to weave tales of infatuation, love, infidelity, illness, death and family.

In Red Rooms, Naomi tells the tales of the young prostitute and her invasive spirits, the terminally ill couture collector, the photographer looking for homegrown identity in foreign lands, the businesswoman who discovers the diary of a jingle-dress dancer and a woman emerging from an obsessive affair. They all check in for a temporary stay, living out complicated lives in these simple spaces. Strung together through Naomi's narration, the stories in Red Rooms portray a complex and beautiful urban Indigenous community.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1926886178
• ISBN13: 9781926886176
• Release Date: May 2013
• Publisher: Theytus Books
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 4.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.1" x 8.9"
• Age Range: 12 to 17 years
• Grade Range: Grades 7 to 12

Customer Reviews

The story of a group of urban natives dealing with their new lives inside an apartment building

The native peoples of this continent are always depicted as living with nature - but this is a modern era, and they have moved on. "Red Rooms" is the story of a group of urban natives dealing with their new lives inside an apartment building, written with great and deft skill invoking countless emotions from the reader, to make them laugh, cry, and care for the characters they find in these stories. "Red Rooms" is enthusiastically recommended for community library collections catering to literary fiction.