Her therapist helps her learn to ground herself and relax, and in turn she teaches her classmates for a school project. At first Raina isn’t sure about seeing a therapist, but over time she develops healthy coping mechanisms to deal with her stress and anxiety.
She worries about sharing food with her friends and eating certain kinds of foods, afraid of getting sick or food poisoning. Raina begins having regular stomachaches that keep her home from school. Even a year later, when she is in fifth grade, she fears getting sick. Young Raina is 9 when she throws up for the first time that she remembers, due to a stomach bug. The beautiful design includes thumbnails of these pictures at the appropriate places in the text and Amini-Holmes’ slightly surreal paintings, which capture the alien flavor of these schools for their students. Opening with a map, the book closes with a photo album, images from her childhood and from archives showing Inuit life at the time. The “Margaret” of the story is co-author, along with her daughter-in-law. There she encounters a particularly mean nun who renames her Margaret but cannot “educate” her into submission. The determination and underlying positive nature of this Inuvialuit child shine through the first-person narration that describes her first two years in boarding school, where their regular chores include emptying “honey buckets.” The torments of the nun she calls “Raven” are unrelenting, culminating in her assignment to wear a used pair of ill-fitting red stockings-giving her the mocking name found in the title. Desperate to learn to read, 8-year-old Olemaun badgers her father to let her leave her island home to go to the residential school for Inuit children in Aklavik, in Canada’s far north.
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