50books_poc | Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve (Reply)

I am quickly becoming a fan of Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve.

1. Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve, The Chichi Hoohoo Bogeyman.

Three sisters* are reunited at their grandparents' house near Pine Ridge for what looks to be a long summer together. Against a backdrop of unexplained, and perhaps supernatural, events related by their parents, the three girls share ghost stories and sneak off for illicit explorations together, eventually encountering a scary stranger that they dub the "chichi hoohoo bogeyman" after the Sioux, Hopi, and European figures that are used to scare young children.

There's a lot I like here. Two of the three girls are mixed-culture (the girls' parents are variously Lakota, Hopi, and white), but there is no exoticization or othering, just the girls building their own culturally-fused world that both overlaps, and is different from, the worlds of their parents. I also love that the girls' illicit explorations isn't framed as children-vs-the adults -- the children worry about their grandparents' potential disappointment in their rule-breaking, and consequently try to work out how to break the rules while living up to the spirit of them, which is a nice switch from what I usually see. Similarly, I recognize and like the intermittent conflicts the bolder two sisters experience about whether to bully their more timid sister along, sometimes leaning toward pushing too hard, but usually falling back to respecting her desires to not do something. I recognize these kids and relationships more than I recognize those that usually appear in "sneaking away from parental supervision" stories.

Also, these girls who take the boat to secretly go explore the island in the river that they don't have permission to go explore? Girls. Not boys. I was all about the "taking the boat and going exploring" books when I was a kid, and they had a way of focusing on boys, boys, boys. (Also, speaking as a girl who loved taking the dinghy out when I was a kid, preferably without parents? I recognize these girls' experience very well.)

Fair warning, Sneve's storytelling style doesn't follow the European convention of relentless-drive-toward-the-storyteller's-goal, but uses a much slower and meandering technique. I enjoyed that, but those wedded to the European storytelling convention are likely to be frustrated by the pace.

2. Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve, Lana's Lakota Moons.

Flag for

oyceter and anyone else who's been looking for intra-POC friendships: the two sisters* in this story are Lakota; their best friend is Hmong.

Pacing-wise, this one ambles and curves even more than The Chichi Hoohoo Bogeyman, but as I said before, I don't consider this a flaw. A good chunk of page-time is spent on cultural education, either the grandparents passing traditions to the children, or the Lakota and Hmong parents exchanging histories and experiences. Readers who don't like "teachy" books -- as distinct from "preachy" books, which this isn't -- aren't going to be fans of this one. I, however, did like this one.

This is a quiet book about a close but conflict-ridden relationship between two sisters, told with a fair bit of underlying sadness and loss, which is interlaced with learning how to identify and preserve what is both valuable and preservable. As you might guess from that description, this isn't a happy-go-lucky upbeat book, but it doesn't read to me as an extreme downer, either. Loss is one of the things that colors the lives of these three girls and their families, but it is not the only thing in their lives, and it is not something that they are utterly helpless in the face of.

It was this book, more than The Chichi Hoohoo Bogeyman, that pushed me over the line into becoming a Sneve fan; I'm definitely keeping an eye out for her other books.

* in the Lakota sense. To most English-speakers, they'd be first cousins.