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

[vegablack62.livejournal.com]

I’m not sure if this book should count toward my fifty because I read it a few weeks before joining the community, but I decided to post a review anyway.  This is my first post so I would welcome any corrections to my methods.

 

I love Sherman Alexie. I’ve read his two collections of short stories, Ten Little Indians, and The Toughest Indian in the World, over and over again.

 

The Absolutely True Dairy is I think his best work. It’s the story of Arnold (Junior) Spirit a young teen who decides in order to get an education to attend the wealthy all white school outside the reservation. This decision makes him in the eyes of the reservation into a traitor, and thrusts him into an all white world where he is the only outsider. In the course of his year at school he experiences unimaginable grief and loss, while the white people around him stare like slack jawed gawkers in the face of his experiences. He makes friends, falls in love and meets the bigoted and the insensitive.

 

Without preaching or even using the words the story gracefully gives a powerful description of institutionalized racism. Few of the white characters set out as individuals to hurt Arnold, yet he is battered and bashed in his struggle to grow up whole and educated. (A few whites are actively vindictive.) Alcohol is a huge cause of tragedy in his world.

 

I was very impressed by his depiction of Arnold’s parents. Alcohol and despair often lead them to neglect him. They forget to pick him up so he has to hitch hike or walk thirty or forty miles at night. He goes to school with nothing but a gallon of Gatorade for breakfast because that is the only food in the house.   He loves them and forgives them their mistakes, because they both love him very much. Oddly, though they at times fail to provide the most basic care, we think of them as good parents, and Arnold is grateful for them. I believe the depiction of Arnold’s parents, and the adults around the reservation, their care and love for Arnold in the midst of their terrible problems, are what sets this book apart from one a white author would have written.

 

The writing is spare and clear. He captures the voice of a teenage protagonist. The accompanying comics add to the story. The pictures were so perfect for his words; I wondered how closely he worked with the illustrator.

First Daughter: White House Rules

[sanguinity]

38. Mitali Perkins, First Daughter: White House Rules.

I had mixed feelings about the previous First Daughter book: loved Sameera, but had big doubts about some key decisions/actions the plot hung on.

I'm happy to say that I enjoyed White House Rules much better in that regard. There's still that credulity-straining thing with the first daughter's public blog having no adult gatekeepers whatsoever, plus a couple dubious aspects to her security detail, but they didn't get in my way of enjoying the book.

Sameera, who has lived her life as a Third Culture Kid, is trying to build local ties in D.C., and do it from behind the White House gates and with the press corps in tow. The boy she'd gotten all starry-eyed with in the last book has inexplicably stopped returning her emails. There's the question of whether Sameera and her cousin will be tutored or attend a local school. Ran, Sameera's cousin, is spending the first six months of the administration in the White House, and is hoping to leverage that time into a Hollywood career. (In the last book, Ran annoyed me with her paparazzi-chasing dreams of starletness; here, she has settled down, has her eye on a filmmaking career, and is stubbornly and tightly focused on getting there. Go do it, Ran!) And there's a lot of matchmaking being performed by Ran and Sameera: everyone is new in D.C., and everyone feels isolated.

Aspects of the school sub-plot did get to me, however: ( benevolent classism, brownface, and the spoilers associated with them )

So. There's that. I really wish Perkins hadn't gone there; that couple of pages makes it hard for me to recommend this as a escapist bit of YA chicklit. Which it would otherwise totally be. :-/

Anyway, I've got another Perkins novel on the shelf here, and I'll be giving that one a go. I'm not ready to give up on Perkins, partly because I've liked what I've read about/by her elsewhere (such as this article she wrote about racial stereotypes in kids' books and her own efforts to get it right). And, yanno, I knew the first one in this series bugged me; finding that the second one in the same series bugs me doesn't really mean that much.

However, before I start this next one, is there anyone out there who's read enough Perkins as to be able to say that such-n-such a title is the one I should read?

Yarnplay

[sanguinity]

39. Lisa Shobhana Mason, Yarnplay.
40. Lisa Shobhana Mason, Yarnplay at Home.

Knitting books! Bwahahahaha! The original userinfo for the comm had a line that even knitting pattern books count (since moved to the FAQ), and ever since I've joined I have been trying to find a knitting book to review for the comm. And now, thanks to some kind people at Ravelry who rec'ced Lisa Shobhana Mason's work: knitting books! Yay!

Mason has a nice eye for colorwork -- slick enough to even tempt me, who is normally resistant to messing around with colorwork. Her textural and design details are slick, and I particularly like what happens when she combines texture with colorwork. (I had used to think that "color changes + purl rows = bad news", but I see now that I was simply misinformed on that.)

Know what else I like about this pair of books? The photos are taken with adequate depth of field (what is it with knitting photos where everything but a single row of stitches is out-of-focus?) and the scarf photos usually show both sides. (As they should, since Mason obviously recognizes that in real life, scarves have two sides.)

The first book is a mixture of clothing and housewares; the second book is all housewares.

Mason's website
Flickr photostream for Yarnplay projects
Ravelry: Yarnplay, Yarnplay at Home.

Octavia E. Butler, Kindred

[rsadelle]

People who know me know that I like sci fi. Octavia Butler is pretty much the classic PoC sci fi author. Aside from this, all I knew about her was that she writes vampire books and she wrote Kindred. I did not read anything about Kindred before I requested it from the library. I kept waiting for the vampires to show up, and only realized 35 pages in that it was not, in fact, a vampire book. D'oh!

Kindred is instead the story of Dana, a black woman married to a white man in 1976, who keeps traveling back to the nineteenth century at moments that allow her to save the life of her white, slave-owning ancestor Rufus.

I read the first thirty-some pages on Monday, another forty-some pages on Tuesday, and the rest of the book in one sitting yesterday, a sitting where I kept thinking, "At the next section break, I'll get up and do my weight lifting," but didn't. That's a pretty good sign that it's an engrossing, compelling story.

I have this idea in my head that Octavia Butler is a Serious Writer who deals with Serious Issues, which she does. The book clearly tackles both the issue of white slave owners fathering children with their black slaves via rape and the issue of how easily people adapt to their circumstances, even if those circumstances mean they become slaves. The Serious Issue that seemed hinted at but not directly addressed is how their time in the past changes Dana and Kevin's relationship in the present of 1976.

Some of the dialogue is a little stilted, and not the nineteenth-century dialogue, either, but the 1976 dialogue. I suspect most of that is simply the formula of writing in the 70s (I can't remember the last time I read a non-children's book written before 1990, so I don't really have anything to compare it to), but there's at least one spot where the message is showing a little too clearly.

In terms of broadening my experience of the world, I have to admit that I had a hard time really accepting how easily Dana adapted to being a slave. I'm not sure how much of this is the writing not pulling me far enough into her head and how much of it is my white privilege that means I've never had to think about what it would be like to be a slave, which is clearly something Dana lives with even before her time travel experiences. I was skimming Racialicious earlier today, and in recounting a discussion about BDSM race play, Andrea Plaid says, "Personally, I think of race play and, yeah, I feel the body memories of slavery, too," which makes me more convinced it's my white privilege showing.