Those Pink Mountain Nights by Jen Ferguson

 First one of the new TBR batch. My recommender chose this book because of my frustration with literary fiction. I went through a year wishing I could find more good literary fiction. I knew what I meant by that. . . vaguely. . . but what my recommenders handed me was mostly a parade of dreary stories featuring female protagonists who were miserable at the beginning of the novel and either were still miserable at the end or somehow made peace with their misery. Nothing fundamentally changed and it was just depressing. The most depressing of them had such promise at the beginning, wonderful set-ups. There was the occasional winner in there, but for the most part, I began to question what people were calling 'literary'. In the end, I told TBR not to give me anymore lit fic among a rant about the difference between existentialism and 'literary'. 

Turns out I don't enjoy existentialist navel gazing in my reading.

This book, Those Pink Mountain Nights, is a YA novel that my recommender felt accomplished what lit fic aims to achieve but with a more meaningful ending. Three teens in a small Canadian (I'm pretty sure) town work in a local pizza parlor. It's a town situated next to a series of ski slopes and that relies on the tourist trade. It also has a high percentage of Native peoples. Two of our teens in fact are Native and at the beginning of the book they are both still mourning the disappearance of a third Native teen named Kiki. 

 This is an issue driven narrative. Despite the large number of stories in various shows and articles in newspapers, many people are unaware of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) issue. Indigenous women are going missing or getting murdered at a rate 6 times the national average for women in North America. The action of Pink Mountain centers around the disappearance of Kiki which is actually resolved at the end of the novel. Other themes have to do with the survival of small business and the way secrets affect friendships.

It's a pretty good book, but I don't think many people would agree with her that this is lit fic. It has a certain coming of age angle, but really this is a slow played mystery. It is also is a slow starter. I really struggled to focus for the first 100 pages, however at that point it picked up and I ended racing through the last 200 pages over about two days. All in all, it's a good read.