Truth and Bright Water is a bildungsroman by Thomas King set in the Canadian Prairies on the Canada–United States border. The novel embeds a number of magical features (such as the disappearing church) within painstakingly realist prose, showing its affiliation with Magic realism. Plot introduction Truth, a small town in rural Montana, and Bright Water, a reserve across the Canadian–American border, are separated by a river. The first person narrator, a 15-year-old Native American (Blackfoot) youth, Tecumseh (named after the famous Shawnee leader), watches a strange woman jump off the cliff into the river that marks the border. His companions are Lum, his cousin, and Soldier, his boxer dog. The plot revolves around their interactions with each other, with their parents, and other people in Truth and Bright Water, which lead up to the great event, the Indian Days festival, and the (partial) resolution of the mystery around the strange woman. Plot summary The novel begins with a Prologue, which describes the setting, the physical landscape around the two towns, Truth on the American side and the reserve Bright Water on the Canadian. The two towns are separated by the Shield river, which also marks the national border, and ineffectually connected by an uncompleted bridge and a "ferry," an old iron bucket suspended over the river on a steel cable. We first meet the three central characters, Tecumseh, his dog Soldier and his cousin Lum, on the riverside. Lum is training for the long-distance run to take place at the Indian Days festival, which he hopes to win. The two boys see a truck approach the coulee; a woman emerges from the vehicle, throws a suitcase into the river and jumps after it herself. However, when the boys and the dog run down to the river to see what happened to her, she has disappeared and Soldier just finds the small skull of a child long dead. The story branches out from this point to touch the stories of other characters connected to Tecumseh, his mother, who yearns to leave Truth to move to a big city and become an actress. His aunt Cassie, his mother's older sister and sometime role-model, who left the reserve to travel the world, but who has a mysterious guilt in her past that seems to bring her back to her home. One of the most central of these storylines involves Monroe Swimmer, who refers