Richie's Picks: THE ABSOLUTE TRUE DIARY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN by Sherman
Alexie, illustrated by Ellen Forney, Little Brown, September 2007, ISBN:
0-316-01368-4
"Mr. President you ought to know that this nation is more a 'Tale of Two
Cities' than it is just a 'Shining City on a Hill.' "
-- Mario Cuomo, 1984 National Democratic Convention Keynote Address
"It sucks to be poor, and it sucks to feel that you somehow deserve to be
poor. You start believing that you're poor because you're stupid and ugly.
And then you start believing that you're stupid and ugly because you're Indian.
And because you're Indian you start believing you're destined to be poor.
It's an ugly circle and there's nothing you can do about it.
So opines high school student and sometime cartoonist Arnold Spirit, aka
Junior, who is despondent as his father prepares to shoot Arnold's suffering dog
because there is no money to pay for a veterinarian's services. But a math
teacher -- whose nose is broken when Arnold, in his frustration, angrily
throws his generations-old math book --endeavors to change Arnold's sense of
helplessness:
" 'You can't give up. You won't give up. You threw that book in my face
because somewhere inside you refuse to give up.'
"I didn't know what he was talking about. Or maybe I just didn't want to
know.
"Jeez, it was a lot of pressure to put on a kid. I was carrying the burden
of my race, you know? I was going to get a bad back from it.
" 'If you stay on this rez,' Mr. P said, 'they're going to kill you. I'm
going to kill you. We're all going to kill you. You can't fight us forever.'
" 'I don't want to fight anybody.' I said.
" 'You've been fighting since you were born,' he said. 'You fought off that
brain surgery. You fought off those seizures. You fought off all the
drunks and drug addicts. You kept your hope. And now, you have to take your hope
and go somewhere where other people have hope.'
"I was starting to understand. He was a math teacher. I had to add my hope
to somebody else's hope. I had to multiply hope by hope.
" 'Where is hope?' I asked. 'Who has hope?'
" 'Son,' Mr. P said. 'You're going to find more and more hope the farther
and farther you walk away from this sad, sad reservation.' "
I'd certainly heard of Sherman Alexie. Back in my bookstore days, a young
college student with whom I worked spoke of him as a god. But I'd never read
any of Alexie's books since he hadn't yet written anything for children or
YAs.
THE ABSOLUTE TRUE DIARY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN is a semi-autobiographical
tale by Sherman Alexie, written for teen readers, that is in turns wacked-out,
funny, heartbreaking, and jubilant. It is the story of an Indian kid who has
survived a precarious infancy and is growing up on a reservation outside
Spokane. It is a powerful story of friendship between two teenage guys who have
grown up together on the reservation. It is the story of Arnold's journey
after he is persuaded by the math teacher to escape the rez school and
transfer to a high school 22 miles away.
And it is a tale of two cities.
"So what was I doing in Reardan, whose mascot was an Indian, thereby making
me the only other Indian in town?"
THE ABSOLUTE TRUE DIARY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN portrays Arnold's struggle
through that ninth grade school year to succeed at the high school in Reardan,
to which he often has to walk and/or hitch. It could be that Arnold's
greatest struggle involves the conflict and guilt that comes from living among the
Indian kids and grown-ups he's seemingly left behind on the reservation in
order to attain that success.
Arnold's humorous and telling drawings (thanks to artist Ellen Forney),
which are "taped" into the diary, significantly bolster the book's boy-charm and
permit us to see, in a second dimension, Arnold's view of his world.
"My head was so big that little Indian skulls orbited around it. Some of
the kids called me Orbit. And other kids just called me Globe. The bullies
would pick me up, spin me in circles, put their finger down on my skull, and
say, 'I want to go there'."
I loved hanging out in Arnold World! Sherman Alexie and his quirky,
in-your-face, first-person tale of contemporary life on and off the reservation
are
both important and extremely welcome additions to the world of young adult
literature.
Richie Partington
Richie's Picks _http://richiespicks.com_ (http://richiespicks.com/)
Moderator, _http://groups.yahoo.com/group/middle_school_lit/_
(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/middle_school_lit/)
BudNotBuddy@aol.com
_http://www.myspace.com/richiespicks_ (http://www.myspace.com/richiespicks)
************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com.
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