The Marrow Thieves

The story is set in a dystopian future in which most people have lost the ability to dream, with catastrophic psychological results. Indigenous people, who can still dream, are hunted for their marrow to create a serum to treat others. Frenchie, the protagonist, tries his best to avoid the Recruiters who are capturing Indigenous people to extract their bone marrow. Along the way north to safety, he falls in with a group led by an older man, Miigwans.[2]

The novel won the Governor General's Award for English-language children's literature at the 2017 Governor General's Awards,[3] the 2018 Burt Award for First Nations, Métis and Inuit Literature,[4] the 2018 Sunburst Award for young adult fiction,[5] and the 2017 Kirkus Prize in the young adult literature category.[6] It was one of the books competing in CBC's 2018 Canada Reads competition,[7] listed in The Globe and Mail's 100 best books of 2017[8] and was a nominee for the 2018 White Pine Award.[9]

Pilleurs de rêves, a French translation of the novel by Madeleine Stratford, was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for English to French translation at the 2019 Governor General's Awards.[10]

Dimaline has said that she chose to write the book for several reasons. She treats the difficult topic of genocide as she wanted readers to know that such events happened to Indigenous people in the past. Dimaline said that she wants readers to come away saying “I would never let that happen again”[11] She also wanted to reach out to young adult readers, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, at an age when they could understand these themes.[12] Dimaline has also said that she wrote the book in order to let people know that everyone needs to respect different people’s stories.[12]

Critical reception for The Marrow Thieves has been positive and the book has received praise from outlets such as Kirkus Reviews.[13] For Quill & Quire, Jessica Rose wrote that Dimaline's book "thrusts readers into the complex lives of rich and nuanced characters forced to navigate a world that too closely resembles our own."[14] In The Globe and Mail, Shannon Ozirny wrote that "Dimaline takes one of the most well-known tropes in YA – the dystopia – and uses it to draw explicit parallels between the imagined horrors of a fictional future and the true historical horrors of colonialism and residential schools" and called the book "beautifully written as it is shocking and painful."[15]