YA Book Review: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My first exposure to Sherman Alexie was in the mid-90s when I saw the film Smoke Signals and then went back and read The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (the book the screenplay was built on). Both the screenplay and novel struck me as beautiful writing. I remember, “He could see his uncles slugging each other with such force that they had to be in love. Strangers would never want to hurt each other that badly.”

And I had to pull the novel off the shelf, but I remember the feelings I had reading this passage over fifteen years ago:

"How much do we remember of what hurts us most? I've been thinking about pain, how each of us constructs our past to justify what we feel now. How each of us constructs our past to justify what we feel now. How each successive pain distorts the preceding. Let's say I remember sunlight as a measurement of this story, how it changed the shape of the family portrait. My father shields his eyes and makes his face a shadow. He could be anyone then, but my eyes are closed in the photo. I cannot remember what I was thinking. Maybe I wanted to stand, stretch my legs, raise my arms above my head, open my mouth wide and fill my lungs. Breathe, breathe. Maybe my hair is so black it collects all the available light."

And then this brilliant moment near the end of the screenplay: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OB0RgM...

"How do we forgive our fathers? Maybe in a dream. Do we forgive our fathers for leaving us too often? or forever when we were little. Maybe for scaring us with unexpected rage. Or for making us nervous because there never seemed to be any rage there at all. Do we forgive our fathers for marrying, or not marrying, our mothers? For divorcing, or not divorcing, our mothers? And shall we forgive them for their excesses of warmth or coldness? Shall we forgive them for pushing...or leaning? For shutting doors, for speaking through walls, or never speaking...or never being silent? Do we forgive our fathers in our age, or in theirs? Or in their deaths, saying it to them, or not saying it? If we forgive our fathers, what is left?"

The "forgive our fathers" moment in the film seized me fifteen years, and then Sherman Alexie faded out of my consciousness until this past year, when I saw quite a few of my students reading his YA novel The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian. I read reviews--and adults and educators loved it. My students mostly gave it favorable reviews (a couple of boys balked at the conclusion).

But I had avoided it...and kept picking up something else, even though it sat on my desk, ready for me to read.

I felt a similar moment when I discovered Vonnegut--I started to consume all of it, and then feared nothing would be left if I read it all too fast, too soon. And then I put Vonnegut down...swore off Vonnegut for years.

I felt the same thing as The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian stared at me and I stared back. Kids started borrowing it from my desk..."well, if you aren't reading it, I'd like to."

And then it disappeared into lockers for weeks...only to resurface and be scooped up again by another student.

Finally, when it resurfaced for a few days in a row I set my mind to read it over a weekend--and I did. And loved it for the following reasons:

a) Alexie's unique voice
b) the exposure I receive to Native American fears, hopes...realities
c) the humanity in his craft
d) every story he tells needs to be told
e) at their core, his stories are about survival, forgiveness, family, loss, and strength

One difference between The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is in the language...in the YA novel, the language is grittier. The youth curse. They make fun of each other. The narrator talks (briefly) about masturbation. The word "boner" appears a few times...both as a mistake, and as a teenager's physical reaction to a woman hugging him. Some adults may be offended or sour their faces at those facts--the point, in my opinion, is that this may cause some parents to steer their 12 and 13 year olds away from the book. And quite honestly, I respect that. If and when some parents want to fence out some literature because their son or daughter is too young in their estimation, that is their right. I guess, I want to say here that these pieces and bits of language are authentic to some teenagers--they are the language of some teens. It resonates as true. They can identify and connect.

And they can laugh about it.

The fact is, Alexie is an artist with language. So much of his text is poetic, powerful, and evocative.

I keep coming back to the young boy who wrote and said to me that he was disappointed in the conclusion. In my mind, he was disappointed because he read it with his own eyes and life experience, and did not have the rich experience of discussing the novel with others his own age, or even with an adult. I think he missed the nuance...he missed the craft...he missed the reward and beauty of Alexie's story.

That's a shame. I wished I had read it before him, so that I could have had that conversation with him.

I definitely recommend this for your older middle school or high school book shelf (as long as you understand what you are getting into with some of the language choices.)





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YA Book Review: The House of the Scorpion

The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Complex and rich, Nancy Farmer's The House of the Scorpion grows from the family history created by drug lord, El Patron--a character mirroring the often bizarre machinations in characters spawned by Oscar Wilde or Nathanial Hawthorne.

El Patron, the most powerful man in the world, builds an empire on opium, slavery, augmented reality, and cruelty. He keeps himself alive for 148 years by harvesting organs from from clones created from his DNA.

The story follows the life of Matteo (called Matt), created from El Patron's DNA. We follow Matt's journey because unlike the other El Patron clones, his brains were kept intact. He was not drugged and operated into idiocy. He was not to be touched or harmed...yet, he was loathed by most around him.

It seems clones are akin to mongrels...not human. Dirty and without souls, many fear them and cringe when one is near. All, except for Matt, are kept away from humans...some strapped in hospitals or animal pens.

Beyond the main characters and those with the most text devoted to them, Farmer excels at building character. Many characters experience emotional highs and lows, moments of humanity, and moments of darkness--darkness emerging from fear, revenge, greed and several other of humanity's frailties.

In this excerpt, we see a bit of Farmer's ability to use artful dialogue to develop character. You may not know this novel, but we know a little something of Matt, Fidelito, and Consuela in just this snippet of text:


Matt blinked away tears. "How can anyone celebrate death?"
"Because it's part of us," Consuela said softly.
"Mi abuelita said I musn't be afraid of skeletons because I carry my own around inside," said Fidelito. "She told me to feel my ribs and make friends with them."
"Your grandmother was very wise," said Consuela.

The writing is so strong in The House of the Scorpion, that novels such as Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, M.T. Anderson's Feed, and Lowry's The Giver came to my mind as I read.

The plausibility of the circumstances surrounding the novel also engaged me--I didn't have to suspend belief because so much of the tale is woven on morality. Gosh, so many opportunities exist for reflection and conversation on morality, science and nature, as well as what makes us human. I love the opportunities presented here for great discussion and most certainly clean, healthy, challenging thought.

I can imagine adolescents having many questions--often beginning with "Why did he/she..."--and I do love that about this book.

Decorated like a naval hero (National Book Award; Newberry Honor Book; Printz Honor Book; ALA Notable Children's Book; ALA Best Book for Young Adults; among others) The House of the Scorpion once passed from hand to hand in my classroom (only a few years ago). Now, with so many other choices flooding the market and our classrooms, great books sometimes find themselves lost in the boneyard.

It is up to teachers, and teachers who are great readers, to keep great contemporary literature in the
hands of adolescents. Please consider adding this to your classroom library and do a book talk on this gem to keep it alive in the hands of this generation of readers.




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YA Book Review: Godless

Godless by Pete Hautman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Only introduced to Pete Hautman's writing this past week after diving into two reading books by Nanci Atwell and Donalyn Miller. The prevailing opinion is that Hautman rates high with adolescent male readers--well, after flying through Godless, I have to admit that he rates pretty high with me too.

Godless completely entertained me.

On the surface the idea seems silly enough--a small group of adolescents decide to worship the town's water tower as its god...its almighty deity. The ensuing mess they find themselves in with their parents and the law reads true and believable.

What starts out as something tongue-in-cheek and in good humor quickly unravels into a brush with death for one boy, and a potentially psychological nightmare for another. Questions of faith, self-image, and friendship buoy the fast-paced plot through any sense of heaviness or ideological debate.

As the protagonist states, after his father attempts to force feed him theological texts during his grounding:

"I read as much as I could. They're all pretty much the same."


"Oh? You're telling me that Teen Jesus is indistinguishable from Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain?"


"They all require a belief in a supreme being. If you don't believe in God, then the books don't mean much."

And this is where Hautman handles the polarizing topic of religion magically. He allows the teenage protagonist to envy those with faith even though he has no idea what he believes in himself:


"I'm not sure what I am."

This is about as deep as it gets. Hautman offers the opportunity for some interesting discussion, but in terms of bang for your buck, you're getting this book for your classroom library for the sheer fact that it is an entertaining book for adolescents--who wouldn't love to read about their climb up onto, and then in, the monolithic water tower for a midnight swim? Outlandish, daring, and stupid pretty much sums up some of the chances I took as a teenager...and Hautman doesn't ever forget that that magic is part of the privilege of being young.

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Book Review: Salvage the Bones

Reading a distinct artistic voice remains one my great pleasures.  Even if I know ahead of time that the writer's voice and acclaim precedes him/her the surprise of the journey through the novel stays with me for a long time.  Steinbeck's The Winter of Our Discontent grabbed me like that--so did Kerouac's On the Road--along with McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Rand's Atlas Shrugged; Robinson's Housekeeping; Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day; de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince...and so on.


This morning I read Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones in one sitting--just under five hours.  Ward is an artist--make no bones about it.  The novel builds in subtle intensity and hits its stride just past the halfway mark--I physically felt the anxiety and squirmed with impatience to read through the next page.  I had to slow myself down, however, so that I did not miss the joy of her craft beyond the story.  The layering of language is unlike anything I've read recently.

The first thing I want to share is that this is a love story.  The layers of love, some frayed, some broken, some deep, just dominates the subtext of each page--from the mother's final words, to the father never changing the bedroom, to the photographs dad kept, to way Skeet attends to China (the pitbull), to what the protagonist craves from Manny, to what Manny will never give her, to the protagonist's coming to grips with what is growing inside of her, the love of the father for his children, to the love extended by neighbors after Hurricane Katrina hits, to final images and moments in novel when Big Henry extends his love for the unborn child, to Skeet sitting and watching and waiting...


This is a brilliant study and journey of love.


And sadly, I will not put it in my 8th grade classroom because of the mature nature of some of the scenes.  I don't hold it against the book or author by any means, and perhaps I shouldn't be so cautious with a beautiful book, but it's just the world we live in now, which is a shame...but that is another story.  However, this does not in anyway reflect on the book.  I make the point of it here to illustrate the power between these pages.  This novel is a shared experience--I defy you to read it and put it and down and pass it off and out of your memory.  You can't do it.

The raw beauty Ward etches into the reader can be traced to her command of nuance within the severity of the subject matter.

My personal loathing and discomfort for dog fighting should have triggered my hands to clap the book closed.  Hey, I can't even watch Marley and Me.  

However, I didn't close the book until I read through to the final page.

A strong case can be made that this story belongs to the main pit bull in the story, China.  To a certain degree, this is her story.  Used as a pawn on the surface, the reader slowly discovers that the money China earns from birthing pups because she is a legendary fighter will go to this family (it's what they do--it is a part of the culture) barely making it on Ramen noodles and eggs found around their property.  

Additionally, and most relevant, China's owner loves her and she loves him back--I'm convinced of it.  It is hard to imagine making a main character a dog who doesn't speak--so, Ward gives us Esche, the only significant female in the story who isn't killed off.  We live the story through Esche and while she has the arc and she experiences change and the story runs through her, I have to argue that much of the same can be said about China.  China's journey, in many ways, mirrors Esche's.


I'm a new and enormous fan of Ward and Salvage the Bones.  Through some raw and gritty subject matter she grabbed my bones and wrung them out for just over four straight hours until I was left with nothing but empathy.


And wonder.


In my heart I know what happened to China.


And it is just devastating to walk away from the final page of the book...because I also know I'm going to carry it with me for a long time.