CREDIT: PUBLISHED BY DANCING CAT BOOKS
One Book One London chooses Canadian title, The Marrow Thieves, as the book to read this winter.

This winter, the London Public Library hosts its third annual One Book One London program, which will be featuring The Marrow Thieves.

The book has an its inspiring title for future community activities from the library.

Kristen Caschera, a librarian from the London public library, said that the program promotes community activities and discussions about everyday issues by examining a chosen book that has related topics.

This year the library has chosen The Marrow Thieves, a Canadian title from Cherie Dimaline, a Toronto writer from the Georgian Bay Métis Nation.

The Marrow Thieves is a fiction book about a dystopian future where people have lost the ability to dream.

The only ones with the ability to still do so are the Indigenous community of North America, which is linked to their bone marrow.

Hunted for their marrow, a young teenager and his companions fight to save their community from being wiped out by the ‘recruiters’ who would steal their lives away for dreams.

The novel is praised for its informative outlook on the real-life struggles and persecution of the Indigenous community in today’s society.

Caschera explained that choosing The Marrow Thieves as the book for the initiative would help bring up a topic that many don’t know much about.

“When we were starting to talk about what books we wanted to potentially promote to the community, we knew we wanted to focus on something with [an] Indigenous theme and an Indigenous focus. The timing worked out perfectly because the author, Cherie Dimaline, is actually our writer in residence in partnership with Western,” Caschera said. “We all read the book, the community read the book and just loved it. We thought it had some really great themes and some great discussion points so we decided to go from there.”

Through January to March, the library will be hosting several discussion meetings, events and activities for the community of London, with the intention of learning teaching more about the Indigenous community.

“There’s a lot of parallels [shown in the book’s themes] in regards to residential schools and sort of generally the terrible treatment of Indigenous people that has happened over the last hundreds of years. We [the library] are hoping that people will be able to get a view of what’s that like and that it will bring up conversations about these sorts of things that Indigenous people go through and the tragedies that have come from that. We [the library] are hoping that it will bring up a lot of conversations for people,” Caschera said.

The list of activities include being able to send in Indigenous related questions to be answered, a workshop on zines and includes a final panel and meet with the author, Cherie Dimaline, and other special guests to talk about stories and music from her heritage.

For a full list of events, activities and dates, check out lpl.ca/onebook.