Narrator: Isabella Star LaBlanc
Recorded Books, Inc.
March 3, 2025
Reviewed by Sharon Mensing
This is the fourth in the Cash Blackbear series about 1970s life in the vast rural farming country around the border between North Dakota and Minnesota. It is the first I’ve listened to, having read paper versions of the first three in the series. This book would work perfectly as an introduction to series. Cash is far more reflective in this book than previous offerings, as befits her growing experience and maturation. Her ruminations provide all of the background a new reader to the series would need to make sense of the plot and her character.
Cash is a young Ojibwe woman in Broken Fields, and as she is on semester break from her college career, she is able to spend the course of the book helping her friend and mentor, Sheriff Wheaton, investigate a farmhouse murder and a small town bank robbery. In fact, she discovers the murder victim when she is plowing a field for a local farmer (work she has done since she was quite young). At the scene, she also discovered a young, traumatized indigenous girl who must have seen the murder take place and whose parents are nowhere to be found. The girl, named Shawnee, is passed into the foster system, as Cash was in her childhood. While Cash assists Wheaton in the investigation of the murder, he also asks her to keep track of and support Shawnee as best as she can.
Cash had developed an ability to separate her mind from her physical experiences when she was mistreated in foster care, and she calls upon that skill to guide her and Wheaton’s investigations. One of the recurring themes in the series is the shortcomings of the foster system, particularly for young indigenous children, and Shawnee’s experience is no exception. Rendon shines a light on this injustice through Cash and Shawnee’s interactions, and Cash’s deep thinking on the topic helps build her character. Broken Fields brings Cash from the impetuous teenager of the previous books to a much more fully developed adult, and that character development is a strength of the book. Other characters are not as fully developed, as they play more of a plot-based function or foils for Cash’s development. The narrator does a tremendous job of voicing the different characters, and she is especially adept at bringing a tone to the native characters that makes their tribal affiliation clear without becoming a stereotype.
Throughout the series, Rendon, who is Ojibwe herself, has dealt with issues related to the entitlement of white farmers in the region during the latter half of the 20th century and the consequences of that entitlement for indigenous people. In addition, in the third book in the series (Sinister Graves) as well as in Broken Fields, she deals with the impact of isolation and male hegemony on women on the farms. There is more depth to her writing than many mysteries/thrillers can claim.
Rendon does not skimp on can’t-put-the-book-down plot moments in favor of characterization and thematic advancement, however. There are several of these in the book, and they are so well done that I can’t comment on specifics of the writing or narrating during those sections since I was so deeply engaged in the images that were playing out in my mind. The resolution makes sense and comes together quickly as a result of the action, rather than through one character telling another what happened.
I have enjoyed all of the books Rendon has written, but this one the most. I appreciate that Rendon has Cash showing a bit more restraint so that there is less beer drinking and cigarette smoking in the narrative. Broken Fields is an excellent continuation of the series and, as I’ve said above, is also a good entry-point for a new reader to jump right in.
Read Mary-Jane Oltarzewski’s review of the print version of this book.