don’t judge a book by it’s cover
February 21, 2008
Alexie, Sherman. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2007.
I’ll be honest…I’ve been sitting on this book for ages. I didn’t like the cover, thought the title was lame and kept putting it off. What a mistake! The story is told through humor, dead-on observation of Indian and teenage life, and cartoons.
Junior, aka Arnold Spirit, is a budding cartoonist and basketball player growing up on an Indian reservation in Spokane.
“I feel important with a pen in my hand. I feel like I might grow up to be somebody important. An artist…So I draw because it might be my only real chance to escape the reservation…I think the world is a series of broken dams and floods, and my cartoons are tiny little lifeboats.”
He is surrounded by poverty, alcoholism and despair. Junior feels destined to follow in the tribes footsteps, until one day he decides he can make his destiny and begins attending the all-white school in Reardon.
“And Indian boys weren’t supposed to dream like that. And white girls from small towns weren’t supposed to dream big, either. We were supposed to be happy with our limitations. But there was no way Penelope and i were going to sit still. Nope, we both wanted to fly.”
There he is faced with racism, but comes to grips with his own identity and becomes more determined to rise above life on the reservation.
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March 18th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
I read this book as well and loved it! Junior’s a hilarious character and he deals with his terrible problems in a great way. I love how he overcomes his problems. I really like his comics, too.