Audiobook Review: Girl Gone Missing by Marcie R. Rendon

Girl Gone Missing 
Author: Marcie R. Rendon
Narrator: Siiri Scott
Series: Cash Blackbear (Book 2)
Publication: Blackstone Publishing (August 18, 2020)
Length: 6 hours and 48 minutes

Description: Her name is Renee Blackbear, but what most people call the 19-year-old Ojibwe woman is Cash.

She lived all her life in Fargo, sister city to Minnesota’s Moorhead, just downriver from the Cities. She has one friend, the Sheriff Wheaton. He pulled her from her mother’s wrecked car when she was three. Since then, Cash navigated through foster homes and at 13 was working farms, driving trucks. Wheaton wants her to take hold of her life and signs her up for college. She gets an education there at Moorhead State all right: sees that people talk a lot but mostly about nothing, not like the men in the fields she’s known all her life who hold the rich topsoil in their hands, talk fertilizer and weather and prices on the Grain Exchange. In between classes and hauling beets, drinking beer, and shooting pool, a man who claims he’s her brother shows up, and she begins to dream of the Cities and blonde Scandinavian girls calling for help.

My Thoughts: The second Cash Blackbear novel has Cash starting college which she finds a really alien environment. Between hippies and flower children and the growing American Indian Movement, she's being introduced to all sorts of things that haven't come into her world before. She used to working for farmers, drinking beer, smoking and shooting pool. She been in her own apartment since she was thirteen and Wheaton got her out of her last abusive foster home. 

When a college girl goes missing for no apparent reason, Cash finds herself introduced to the white slavery industry which is also something new to her. Another new thing is the reappearance of her brother. She hasn't seen him or heard anything about him since she was taken from her mother as a small child and started on the parade of foster homes. Mo tracks her down and moves in to get to know her. He's a recently discharged Vietnam veteran who was a medic and who has come home with PTSD. They spend time together drinking beer and shooting pool. 

Cash is doing well in college. So well, in fact, that she opts to test out of her freshman English and science classes. Her results on her English final are so good that her professor enters her into an essay contest which will result in her first trip to the Twin Cities for the award ceremony at Macalaster College. And it results in her own encounter with white slavery.

I really enjoyed this story. The setting is familiar to me since I am also a Minnesotan although the Red River Valley is on the opposite side of Minnesota from where I grew up. Cash and I would be near in age and, although our life experiences couldn't be more different, some aspects were completely familiar. 

I liked the author's note that talks about real problems faced by Native American women. 

I got this one from Audible Plus. You can buy your copy here.