The Strangers is a sequel to Katherena Vermette’s The Break, so if you have not read The Break yet, do not read this review as there be spoilers ahead.

My initial reaction to The Strangers was displeasure at having to read more about Phoenix fucking Stranger, whose heinous actions in The Break left me feeling repulsed by her character. Thankfully, The Strangers is not just about Phoenix, although it is about her family. The novel rotates through the perspectives of Phoenix, her younger sister, Cedar, their mother, Elsie, and Elsie’s mother, Margaret. It is a story about mothers who fail their children, and how this failure can bleed through generations of a family.

The Strangers begins with Phoenix in jail for sexually assaulting Emily, and about to give birth to her own child who she decides to name after her dead sister, Sparrow. After giving up her baby, Phoenix sinks into depression and begins receiving visits from an Elder named Ben who helps her work through the trauma that has made her the angry, violent person that she is. Meanwhile, Cedar, who has been shuffled around the foster care system for years after Elsie lost custody of her children, finds out that her estranged father, Shawn, has cleaned up his life and wants custody of her. She goes to live with Shawn, his wife, a white woman named Nikki, and Nikki’s hostile half-Cree daughter named Faith. Cedar is hopeful this means she will finally have a better life, but she ends up feeling just as lonely living with her father’s family as she did in the foster care system.

Phoenix and Cedar’s mother, Elsie, a tragic figure who was briefly mentioned in The Break, spends the novel fighting her addictions and mired in her grief from the death of her youngest child, Sparrow. She is determined to turn her life around so that she can get her remaining children back, but without proper support, her prospects seem dire. Elsie’s mother, Margaret, is dead in the present timeline of the story, so Margaret’s part of the story is the history of the Stranger family. Margaret is the youngest child, and only girl, of her family. By the time she was born, her mother, Annie, did not have much interest in raising her. Margaret wants to make a better life for herself, but instead she becomes pregnant with Elsie. Annie guilts Margaret into having the baby, and Margaret ends up with a child she does not want. She eventually leaves Elsie to be raised by her grandparents. Annie gives Elsie the affection that she never gave Margaret, and spoils Elsie so much that Elsie does not know how to take care of herself, let alone her own children.

By the time Annie dies, there is so much anger and resentment festering between Margaret and Elsie, that it is inevitable Elsie’s life ends up the way it does. For a story about the strength of matrilineal bonds, I would not say that The Strangers celebrates them. If anything, the matrilineal bonds of the Stranger women are their weakness. Phoenix contempt for Elsie’s failure as a parent festers inside her like a wound that will not heal. Cedar keeps hoping that Elsie will be the mother that she needs, even though she knows its hopeless. And Elsie has been ruined by both her grandmother’s and her mother’s actions. Like The Break, The Strangers is a good novel, but it is not a story where everyone works through their trauma and comes out the other side as a better person. It is an authentic and not at all joyful portrait of the complicated bonds between emotionally damaged mothers and their equally damaged daughters.