The Absolutely True Diary of a parti-time Indian

Alexie, S. (2007). The absolutely true diary of a part-time Indian. NY: Little Brown. Arnold “Junior” Spirit has defeated the odds of survival, even though he was born with life-threating hydrocephalus and to a poor Spokane Native American family. Junior is smart as a whip and loves to learn. He notices that everybody on the reservation stays there and doesn’t move on. Just being fourteen years old, he has been to 42 funerals and many of them related to booze. He tries to change his future and transfers out of the reservation high school and enrolls in Reardan High School 22 miles away where he is the only Native American except the mascot. Junior learns that ropes of the high school where everybody was suspicious of him. He finally gets the education he wants, friends, made the varsity basketball team, got a girlfriend, and was not considered the weak link like on the tribe. Along the way of his freshman year at Reardan, he has many family loses. His best friend Rowdy, stops talking to him because he becomes a trader, his grandmother gets struck by a drunk driver, his dad’s best friend got shot in the face, and his sister is burned to death in her trailer while she was passed out. Through all these devastations he learns that booze is evil and not something to take lightly and to make dreams happen you need to become nomadic like in the ancient tribes. Through all the devastations he adhered in that past year, his friend Rowdy comes around and tells him that he admires him for his strength. I admire Junior for putting himself at odds with his own tribe in an effort to break free of the future he knows he would have if he stayed at the school on the reservation. Courage to change the future is such a scary thing to do, but this theme was read throughout the book because it seems that Native Americans like other family oriented races seem to stay together and not leave each other. It took courage for Junior to drive 22 miles away for school and see that his tribe turns their backs on him. A kid at fourteen years old shouldn’t go through something like this, but he had the strength and support of his own family to help him carry out his dream. Related books: Mexican WhiteBoy by Matt de la Pena, The First Part Last (Heaven #2) by Angela Johnson, and A Step from Heaven by An Na.