The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian - Sherman Alexie

Frankly, I don’t read a lot of YA fiction anymore because, in these days where the ultra-woke censors cancel anyone who doesn’t follow their ludicrous rules to the letter, I think a lot of it is trash. That said, I am a rabid opponent of censorship, even of the words of those who do not blink while censoring others themselves, so if young people want to read trash (and who hasn’t read trash at some point in their lives), so be it. Book banning (in this case from the conservative right) is the reason, really, that I picked up Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian in the first place. I’ve read Alexie before, and I’m a fan. So why, I wondered, was this National Book Award Winner being yanked out of some public school libraries. And now, after having read the book, I still wonder why.

The “part-time Indian” referenced in the novel’s title is a fourteen-year-old boy whose family has lived on the Spokane Indian Reservation for generations. It is the only life Arnold Spirit, Jr. has ever known, but the bright teen is about to make a decision that will forever change the lives of him and everyone in his family: Junior decides to move to the all-white high school in the small town about twenty miles from the reservation. To say that this doesn’t go over well with his friends on the reservation, especially with his best friend Rowdy, is an understatement. Overnight, Junior becomes known to one and all as an “apple,” red on the outside and white on the inside.

It doesn’t help that Junior feels completely out of place in the new school or that he is largely ignored there. Being ignored at first seems like a blessing, and then not. 

Junior is a nerd who, because he was born with hydrocephalus, commonly known as “water on the brain,” has had plenty of time to indulge in his favorite hobbies: reading and drawing his own cartoons. He knows that he is one of the smartest people in the reservation high school, but he’s not at all sure whether he’ll be able to compete in his new school. What he discovers is that not only can he compete academically, but that he is also one of the best basketball players there. 

Watching Junior win the acceptance, and enduring friendship, of a group of young people who previously only knew American Indians via the stereotypes passed down to them from their own parents and grandparents is heartening, but the revelations Junior makes along the way about himself, his family, his tribe, and life on the reservation are heartbreaking ones. Among Junior’s observations are these:

“Considering how many young Spokanes have died in car         wrecks, I’m pretty sure it’s my destiny to die in a wreck, too. Jeez,         I’ve been to so many funerals in my short life. I’m fourteen years        old and I’ve been to forty-two funerals.That’s really the biggest difference between Indians and white people.”

“Reservations were mean to be prisons, you know? Indians were supposed to move onto reservations and die. We were supposed to disappear. But somehow or another, Indians have forgotten that reservations were meant to be death camps. I wept because I was the only one who was brave and crazy enough to leave the rez. I was the only one with enough arrogance. I wept and wept because I knew that I was never going to drink and because I was never going to kill myself and because I was going to have a better life out in the white world.”

Bottom Line: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian explores the emotional reality of life on a reservation, and how pressures from the reservation community can potentially keep some people tied there forever despite their wishes to carve out a different life for themselves in the wider world. Peer pressure can be the most crushing pressure of them all, and Junior has to struggle mightily to escape the pressure from his friends to stay where he is just like almost all of their older brothers and sisters have always done. Sherman Alexie, through Junior, shows the rest of us what that must feel like.

A few dozen (I haven’t counted them) cartoons are interspersed throughout the novel, cartoons that Junior uses to express his feelings about what his happening to him at the moment. They are very well drawn, and readers learn much from the cartoons about Junior’s emotional response to his new status as a “part-time” Indian. Ellen Forney, in collaboration with the author, produced the art work — and it contributes much to the reader’s understanding of what Junior Sprit is experiencing. 

Sherman Alexie

Collecting the Dead - Spencer Kope

Collecting the Dead (2016) is the first in Spencer Kope’s now four-book series featuring Magnus “Steps” Craig, and it’s a doozy of a book. “Steps” is a human tracker, an FBI man who specializes in going into the deep woods to locate the missing victims of what all too often turns out to be a serial killer. You’ve probably seen the real-life version of a Steps Craig on television before because the reality is that there are some very serious serial killers out there right now, and there always will be. Along with the rest of the team, Jimmy Donovan and Diane Parker, Steps tries to find as many of the hidden as he can before it is too late to save them. 

Steps Craig, though, is not what he seems. The man has a secret and he wants to keep it that way: Steps is the best tracker in the business because he has a talent that no other tracker has, a talent he explains this way:

“I see the hidden; I see the shine, every touch, every footfall, every cheek on a pillow, every hand on a wall. Some might call it an aura, I just call it life energy; either way it leaves its soft glowing trace on everything we come in contact with, radiating even from the blood we leave behind. Sometimes it’s chartreuse with a wispy texture, or muddy mauve, or flaming coral, or a crimson baked-earth. Every shine is different and specific to a person, like fingerprints or eye scans or DNA.”

The problem is that Steps can’t turn this unique talent on and off at will. It is so disturbing and distracting an ability, in fact, that he has to wear a specially designed set of eyeglasses to eliminate all of the vivid colors that would otherwise make it impossible for him to get through a normal day. But right now, he needs to see all those colors because Steps and Jimmy have been called out to examine the remains of yet another young woman, and what he finds there is disturbing in the worst way. Not only does he find the expected shine; he recognizes it and also finds the killer’s “signature” drawing of a sad face. This means the team is facing yet another serial killer.

So the last thing Steps needs is the reappearance of his personal serial killer nemesis, a man he’s been trying to catch for the last ten years. “Leonardo,” as he calls him, is so evil that Steps can barely sleep from the frustration of not being able to catch up with the man, and when he does manage to fall asleep his Leonardo nightmares terrify him. But for the moment, Leonardo is going to have to be put on the back burner because the Sad Face Killer knows that he is being hunted — and he likes it.

Bottom Line: The premise of a man like Steps Craig may be a little farfetched, but it works brilliantly because Kope is so good at humanizing Steps, Jimmy, Diane (who may be my favorite character of them all), and all the side-characters on both sides of the good vs. bad equation. Too, Kope ends this introductory volume on the perfect note, with a revelation of what is to come in the second book — and he does it without having to resort to one of those frustrating cliffhangers that most readers hate. Instead, Kope tells us that Leonardo is back — and it’s game on in Whispers of the Dead, the 2018 addition to the Magnus “Steps” Craig series. 

Oh…and I love the fact that Steps Craig is a book collector, and the way that Kope uses that personality trait in this book. That’s a really nice touch.

Spencer Kope

(Thanks to Cathy of Kittling Books for bringing Spencer Kope and this series to my attention with her recent review of the latest Magnus “Steps” Craig novel.)

The Book Chase November 2021 Reading Plan

I've been so busy all day that I'm just now at 3:00 p.m. finally sitting down to consider a reading plan for November. In October I ended up reading fifteen books in total, and eight of those were on the nine-book list I began the month with. Eight of nine is an unusually high percentage for me. 

Here's the way I see November shaping up for the most part:

I've become a big Sherman Alexie fan in the last few months, so I was curious about this YA effort that did so well for him. I wondered what the message would be and what insights it would offer into a reservation coming-of-age. I was also wondering why in the world The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian keeps getting banned in a few places. Well, I'm about halfway through the book...and I'm still wondering why that is. The book is irreverent and funny when you least expect it, and even though I'm not much into YA, I'm enjoying this one so far.

This is the first book in Spencer Kope's four-book series featuring a very special FBI tracker called "Steps" Craig. I only found this one after Cathy over on Kittling Books posted about how much she enjoyed the latest addition to the series. Steps pretends to be just another talented man-tracker, but in reality he tracks criminals and lost victims by the distinctive "shine" (their aura) they shed wherever they go. In this first book, he's already feeling burned out, can't sleep at night, and is depressed, so it will be interesting to see how he makes it all the way to four books.

The Silent Sisters is Robert Dugoni's third book in his Charles Jenkins series, a series I happened (for a change) to start with the very first book. Jenkins is an American secret agent who specializes in on-the-ground work in Russia..quite a trick for a large black man to pull off. It's hard to imagine how Jenkins could possibly blend into a crowd whenever he was out on the streets of Russia, and so far he has survived only by the skin of his teeth. The "sisters" are Russian women who were prepared from birth by their parents to work for the Americans, and now the last two urgently need to be extracted.

In Travels with George, Nathanial Philbrick explores the question, "Does George Washington still matter?" My personal opinion is that it would be foolish to "cancel" George, so that's not why I'm reading this one. I'm more intrigued by the way that Philbrick takes a road trip along the same path that Washington took after his election to speak with ordinary citizens in all the former British colonies. Philbrick doesn't pull any punches when dealing with "Washington the Slave Owner," but he shows how the man almost singlehandedly kept the country from splitting apart shortly after its first national election.

I've been a Gerald Seymour fan for right at 30 years now, so I was glad to find this one. This is the story of a British secret service agent who is sent to Saudi Arabia on what he knows is an almost-certain suicide mission. The thing I like most about Seymour's books is that his plots all seem to be torn right out of today's newspaper. He's as good as any thriller writer out there, but his special talent is how real and believable he makes even the wildest plots seem. If you haven't read Gerald Seymour you are missing out on one of the best.

This is the one book on my October list that didn't get read last month. I've had it for a while, but I've been slow to read it because it's still so difficult to get Shaw's books in the US. But a few days ago, I ordered and received Grave's End, the book that follows this one, from Book Depository. Also, I read enough other suspenseful police procedurals in October that I didn't want to finally read Deadland with the risk that I would get its plot details confused with another similar book. This is the month.

It's been kind of hard for me to hide my newfound enthusiasm for Ann Cleeves's novels, so I guess it's no surprise that I plan to read the second book in her Vera Stanhope series this month. This time around, Vera is working a ten-year-old cold case in which a woman was convicted of murdering a fifteen-year-old girl. New evidence strongly indicates that the woman is innocent, and that the real murderer is still out there somewhere. Vera is perfectly willing to open up the can of worms that local villagers would rather keep sealed. 

I picked up The Elephant of Belfast just this morning at the library while I was there returning a few other books. I was determined not to bring any new books home this trip, but I remember one of the bloggers I read regularly (shamefully, I can't remember which one) giving this book a good review, so the title jumped right out of me. It's got a lot going for it: WWII historical fiction, a zoo, a bonding between a human and an animal...and best of all that animal is an elephant. Looking forward to this one a lot.

I'm going to leave it at these eight, realizing that I'll probably only read five or six of them along with five or six others that sneak into November. It's hard even to imagine what those sneakier books may turn out to be, but it always happens that way...so there's only one way to find out. It's on to November.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle - Shirley Jacksom

If you enjoy writers like Stephen King, Neal Gaiman, or Richard Matheson, I have some great news for you. Shirley Jackson, who was an absolute master of psychological suspense and horror fiction, did it better than any of them. And despite dying of a progressive heart illness in 1965 at just 48, Jackson left behind a relatively substantial body of work for readers to explore and enjoy. 

One of my own Shirley Jackson favorites is her last novel, 1962’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which critics have dubbed a “gothic mystery.” In approximately 150 pages, depending on which edition you read, Jackson creates a weirdly believable small-town world in which jealous townspeople finally find an opportunity to get even with the rich family in town that has for generations made all of them feel so inferior. And one night they get their revenge in spades.

The story begins when “Merricat” Blackwood, one of two sisters living in the Blackwood family home introduces herself this way:

“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.” 

Merricat, our narrator, then begins a flashback of a few months duration describing the last time she went into town to pick up library books and a few groceries for her and her sister. It is obvious from the way that she is treated in town, that the townspeople see Merricat as something strange and a bit horrifying, and that they feel free to torment her right up to the point where they draw the line at physical abuse. Merricat has so little self-awareness that her inner thoughts and compulsive rituals mark her as a target even for the children living in town. 

Back at home in the fenced-in Blackwood family estate, we learn that some six years earlier the Blackwood family suffered a tragedy that only three of them survived: Merricat, her older sister Constance, and the girls’ Uncle Julian. The survivors have been completely isolated from their neighbors ever since, with the exception of Merricat’s quick Tuesday runs into town for supplies and new library books. The townspeople, while not particularly upset about the number of people who died that night, believe that what happened was not an accident. And because making someone pay for what happened is the easiest way for them to feel superior to the Blackwoods for the first time in their lives, they jump all over that opportunity when it suddenly presents itself.

Bottom Line: We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a mystery that only gradually reveals its truths as each layer of the relationship between the sisters is peeled back. Some of the secrets are revealed through Julian’s rambling memories even though it is apparent that the man’s mind is no longer what it once was. But it is only when a wildcard character, the ruthless cousin of the girls’, moves into the Blackwood estate that their world finally blows up. Neither they, their cousin, or the people in the town will ever forget what happens next — and none of them will ever be the same.  

Shirley Jackson

Happy Halloween!

Cost of Living - Emily Maloney

Emily Maloney’s Cost of Living is a series of essays that, when taken as a whole, comprise an interesting memoir of the author’s intimate experience with America’s healthcare system. First as a patient, and then as a caregiver herself, Maloney offers a behind the scenes look that will be probably be disconcerting and scary to some readers while confirming the darkest fears of others who have had a little more experience with how the system works in this country.

For Emily Maloney, it all started when she tried to kill herself as a nineteen-year-old. Maloney’s attempt at taking her own life may have been unsuccessful, but it left her saddled with an enormous medical debt for treatment that she would struggle to pay off for years to come. The failed attempt also meant that Maloney would be seeing mental health doctors and taking a series of psychiatric drugs for years — treatments and drugs that sometimes seem to have done as much harm as good. Ironically enough, in order to pay off her past healthcare debts and to be able to continue affording her ongoing treatments, Maloney decided to work in the healthcare industry herself.

What she learned firsthand about billings and collections, hospitals, emergency rooms, medical staffs, and pharmaceutical companies is enough to make anyone uneasy about dealing with the system. Maloney’s essays do not paint a pretty picture. She speaks of patients and insurance companies being gouged by the purposeful uncharging of doctors and hospitals determined to maximize profits. She tells us about the burned out staffs so common to emergency rooms and the minimal level of care that most patients ever receive in them. She speaks to the indignities and dangers of being treated in a training hospital or emergency room. And using her own experiences with large pharmaceutical companies as background, she gives a thorough indictment of the waste and borderline illegal practices that make medicine so expensive to those who desperately need it for their survival. 

Bottom Line: Cost of Living certainly offers a bleak look at the US healthcare system. While what Emily Maloney has to say about the system will not come as a surprise to most people who have had to deal with major health problems of their own or those of family members, it will serve as a warning to other more fortunate readers who have yet experienced it all for themselves. It will open some eyes. Despite her shaky start in life, the author has achieved much, and it would be interesting to hear her story in a more traditionally constructed memoir that focuses on how she did it. 

Emily Maloney

Review Copy provided by Henry Holt & Company

Cost of Living to be published on February 8, 2022 

The Crow Trap - Ann Cleeves

Up until recently, I knew Ann Cleeves only through the television series Shetland and Vera, having noticed that both shows credit Cleeves as originator of the main characters being featured in each. So when I started seeing all the buzz about Cleeves’s new Two Rivers series being generated by the latest addition to the for-the-moment two-book series (The Heron’s Cry), I decided to go back and read The Long Call, the first book in that series, for myself. I enjoyed that one enough to make me want to read something else from Cleeves as soon as I could. But preferring not to wait a year between series books if I don’t have to, I decided to start the nine-book Vera Stanhope series from the beginning instead of immediately catching up on the new Detective Matthew Venn series. 

The Crow Trap (1999) is outstanding for a number of reasons, not the least being that the series lead, Vera Stanhope, doesn’t really show up until page 229 of the 535 page edition I read. (It should be noted that Vera did make an anonymous cameo appearance some pages earlier, but that was only as a rather odd woman who enters a funeral service very late — and very loudly.) And it is only in Part Three of the novel, page 413, that the reader begins to see things from Vera’s point of view. This may be an unusual approach, but it allows Cleeves to describe what is happening through the eyes of three very different women forced to live in isolation together because of their work. By the time Vera begins her investigation, everything is set-up for readers to begin making their own assumptions, and Cleeves has liberally sprinkled hints and red herrings all over the place for them to deal with. 

Too, Vera is not quite what you would expect in the way of a detective worthy of starring in her own long-running series, especially one this popular. The first time she really comes center stage, Vera is described this way:

“She was a large woman — big bones amply covered, a bulbous nose, man-sized feet. Her legs were bare and she wore leather sandals. Her square toes were covered in mud. Her face was blotched and pitted so Rachel thought she must suffer some skin complaint or allergy. Over her clothes she wore a transparent plastic mac, and she stood there, the rain dripping from it onto the floor, grey hair sleeked dark to her forehead, like a middle-aged tripper caught in a sudden storm on Blackpool prom.”

But don’t make the mistake that her adversaries too often make. Vera may very much be her own woman, but she is brilliant. And those who underestimate her are making a bad mistake.

The Crow Trap is a complicated story of small town life in rural England, a place that is still very class conscious despite so many of its residents having a pretty good idea of where everyone’s skeletons are buried. In an even more remote cottage outside the village, three women are working on an environmental study that has to be completed before a local quarry will be allowed to expand its footprint and impact in the area. Some are for it and some hate to think about how different things will be for the locals if the quarry is allowed to expand. Things begin to get interesting after it appears that one property owner has killed herself, but it is only when a second body turns up later that Vera Stanhope and Joe Ashworth learn exactly how ugly everything about this case really is.

Bottom Line: The Crow Trap is an excellent introduction to the Vera Stanhope character even for readers who already have the television image of Vera firmly affixed in their minds. Honestly, since I’m one of those myself, I have to say that actress Brenda Blethyn is just about perfect for the television role, and already having her as my image of Vera was not at all distracting as I read The Crow Trap. Cleeves is best known for her Vera Stanhope and Shetland series right now, and it is easy to see why that is. She has set the bar really high for her new Two Rivers series. Now that she is alternating Vera Stanhope novels and Matthew Venn novels, there is a lot to look forward to — and that’s not even to mention her substantial back catalogue. 

Ann Cleeves