Sisters of the Lost Nation

On the Takoda Indian Reservation, where the Grand Nacre Casino and Resort opened two years earlier, 17-year-old Anna Horn navigates relentless school bullying, a fracturing family, and a childhood fear she cannot shake. A prologue set ten years earlier establishes that fear: Anna's Uncle Ray told her that he found unearthed graves at the tribal cemetery, including that of Chief Hilaire Broussard, the tribe's last official chief, whose skull was missing. Ray claimed the skull rolled through the reservation devouring anyone it encountered, and he suggested it ate Miss Shelby Mire, the tribe's beloved singer and keeper of the tribe's traditional stories, who disappeared that summer.

The novel's timeline is nonlinear, moving between Day 1 and Day 36 of a five-week span. On Day 1, Anna walks home from school, where her entire senior class voted her homecoming king as a prank exploiting her broad build and habit of wearing her father's old clothes. The reservation is transforming around her: casino money has paved the dirt roads, filled homes with new appliances, and lifted many families through per capita payments. Anna visits Miss Shelby's condemned trailer, where she has been borrowing books since July, when two 19-year-old tribal members, Erica Landry and Amber Bloom, vanished. She searches the texts for old Takoda stories and for anything that might explain her fear of the rolling head.

At home, Anna's parents, Chris and Dorothy, fight constantly, their marriage crumbling. Grandma Joan, who had a stroke six months earlier, lives in the former dining room behind a bedsheet curtain. Anna's 15-year-old sister, Grace, has grown distant, desperate for social acceptance and sneaking out at night. Thirteen-year-old Robbie, their brother, occupies himself with a new rifle. Chris pushes Anna to propose a tribal preservation society at the council meeting, but Anna resists. Grace begs for a cell phone, which Chris refuses, and mutters she might run away like Erica and Amber, a remark that foreshadows what is to come.

Fox Ballard, the hotel's evening housekeeping manager and nephew of tribal chairman Eaton Ballard, recruits Anna from the morning shift, praising her work ethic and silence. He promotes her to service suite 808 on the restricted eighth floor, giving her an elevator access card and unusual instructions: empty the mini bar, close all curtains, set the thermostat to 68 degrees. Anna realizes the suite is being prepared for short-term encounters rather than overnight guests. Fox controls her through a cycle of intimidation and small rewards, grabbing her roughly when she lingers too long and then apologizing with cash.

At school, Anna's torment escalates. Dolls with blacked-out eyes appear on her locker. Grace and her best friend Emily abandon Anna at lunch to sit with popular upperclassmen. Anna learns that boys have been spreading a sexual rumor about Grace after the homecoming dance.

On Day 33, the timelines converge. Anna finds a tube of strawberry lip balm beneath the bed in suite 808, the same brand Grace uses daily. Panicked, she searches the hotel and the reservation for her sister. At Fox's house, she finds drug paraphernalia and Fox in a manic state. He denies everything and throws Anna out. Tribal police chief Luke Fisher arrives but notes Grace's history of sneaking out.

Earlier, Anna encountered a crying young woman fleeing the eighth floor and a girl in a chambermaid coat stumbling down the emergency stairwell whom she suspected was Missy Picote, a 14-year-old tribal member later reported missing. Anna also befriends Lula Broussard, a single mother living near Miss Shelby's trailer, who reveals that Fox recruited her to provide company to a man in suite 808 for money. The man rejected Lula, saying she was "too old." Anna realizes the men want underage girls.

Anna remembers the hotel's security cameras and calls Luke. Surveillance footage from the night Grace disappeared shows Paul Albert, a heavyset white doctor from town whose tire Anna changed earlier that evening, entering suite 808. Fox leads Grace, dressed in a chambermaid coat, into the suite minutes later. A second man, whom Fox knows only as Claude LeBlanc, enters after them. Grace exits at 9:23 p.m. and walks alone through the parking lot. The same men appear on footage from the night Missy vanished. Luke orders Fox detained.

At an emergency tribal meeting, Luke explains that the county sheriff refuses to help because the girls were last seen on tribal land. Tribal police cannot arrest non-Indians, and outside authorities have little incentive to investigate crimes on reservations, a jurisdictional gap that allows crimes to be committed with impunity.

Anna discovers Albert's Lincoln Continental abandoned on a road with blood on the asphalt. On Day 36, she enters Miss Shelby's bedroom for the first time and discovers two handwritten books preserving Takoda stories. Among them is "The Tale of Two Sisters": A younger sister disobeys her older sister, is hurt by a man, and in her rage devours herself until only her head remains. The head rolls through the village until the older sister digs a hole, traps it, and shakes it until it spits everyone out, restoring the younger sister to wholeness. Anna recognizes the parallels to her own life and sees the story as a guide.

She digs a hole in the field and waits. The head appears but rolls away from her. She chases it across the reservation into a clearing near the Heaven and Hell tree, a charred landmark at the reservation's edge. She finds Missy Picote's body wrapped in a bloody blanket. Fox attacks from behind, trying to set the field on fire to destroy the evidence. He pins Anna down and attempts to suffocate her. She wraps a discarded chambermaid coat around his neck until he loses consciousness, then fires Robbie's rifle to signal her family. Luke arrests Fox.

At the police station, Fox agrees to talk only to Anna. He confesses that Claude LeBlanc recruited him to sneak women into the suites, then demanded younger girls and began running a trafficking operation with Albert as a paying customer. When Missy resisted, LeBlanc struck her with his truck and killed her. Fox helped transport the body. LeBlanc ordered Fox to groom a replacement: Grace, whom Fox had been cultivating with attention, secret notes, and promises of a cell phone. When Albert tried to go to police to confess, Fox killed him with a dumbbell. Fox insists he does not know where Grace is or LeBlanc's real identity.

In the epilogue, set on Day 433, Grace has been found. She was gone for 379 days before calling Anna from the side of a road in Cleveland, Ohio, battered and barely clothed, pushed from a car. Anna has since won approval for the Takoda Cultural, Educational, and Resource Center, a complex housing a museum, an educational center, addiction treatment, counseling, and a crisis facility. Miss Shelby's handwritten books are preserved in acid-free boxes. A plaque for the center honors Shelby Mire, Amber Bloom, Erica Landry, Missy Picote, "and every Native woman / who hasn't made it home." Grace, scarred but alive, helps Anna design the complex. Anna writes in her notebook that those who search will never stop, looking up at the sky and asking: "Do you see me?"