I started reading this book because I was read part of it by Dr. Overstreet in Teaching of Writing. I was instantly hooked. The narrator, Arnold Spirit, has such an honest, distinct voice that it is really hard to put the book down. I was constantly engaged from beginning to end and found myself finishing it in two days. I feel that this would be a great book to offer students. It has the same youthful, honest teenage voice that students love to read, but within the context of a different culture. I never got the chance to read much outside of my own culture and would have benefited from knowing that the themes I was learning about my own world existed in other societies too.
This book was just so good that I haven't even had a chance to process it into classroom worthy material, other than being positive I would use it. Besides relating to other teenage survival stories, it presents new and perhaps unknown problems that only certain people face. Arnold relates his struggles with being a motivated Indian living amongst poor, drunken Indians on a reservation. He fights to make a better life for himself than anybody in his family has had and catches slack from his friends and family for doing so.
I would use this book in a multicultural unit or amongst a variety of other teen novels. It stands out so much to me as the perfect answer to the same old whiny white kid who can't get a date...try being a poor Indian living on a reservation for a day. It is such an important book and I can't wai to share it with my students.
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really like your comments about what this book offers in terms of its multicultural take on the age old subject of the angst of adolescence. Okay, not sure that sentence really works.
But I found your comment about not having read much outside of your own culture as an adolescent yourself - and how this offers a new take, b/c of the setting/multicultural piece - to be an interesting one.
I do feel like there is a lot of good multicultural YA lit, and it's a good way to broaden kids' horizons.
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