The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
By Sherman Alexie
Sherman Alexie
Author, Poet, Screenwriter
... all the way back to the very first poor people.”
Winner of this year’s National Book Award for young people’s literature, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian overflows with truth, pain and black comedy amid lacerating memories of life on the rez. Closely based on the author’s own childhood on the Spokane Reservation in Washington, the novel is an unforgettable portrait of getting by in harsh circumstances, then getting out.
“Who has the most hope?” Junior, a Spokane Indian, asks his parents. “White people” is their instantaneous and simultaneous reply, confirming for Junior what he already knew: if he is to have any hope of fulfilling his dreams, he has to leave the rez.
Bracing the fierce anger of his best friend, Rowdy, Junior attends a white high school twenty-two miles from his home, where he falls in love, makes a few friends, and becomes a basketball legend. His triumph is always more bitter than sweet, though, as a boy caught between two conflicting worlds of loyalty and responsibility. His sense of humor and his cartooning become his salvation as he bears the loneliness of trying to escape the life of poverty and/or alcoholism that the perpetual grief of his community as they bury more people in a year than his white friends have lost in their whole lives; his pain reaches a peak when he loses his sister, who made her own escape from the rez by marrying a guy she met at a casino and moving to Montana, only to get drunk and die without waking up in a trailer fire.
Through these experiences, though, he begins to get a sense of who he is and where he belongs, of which affiliations he can afford to keep and which he must walk away from; most poignant is the gift of identity that Rowdy give him as he too comes to terms with what Junior must do to survive.
The grief in this narrative is enough to leave a reader gasping, with both the humor and the hope always deepened by sadness and the ever-present niggling of undeserved and impotent guilt. Nevertheless, what emerges most strongly is Junior’s uncompromising determination to press on while leaving nothing important behind.
(Source: The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, September 2007)
Sherman Alexie Biography
Website Resources:
Sherman Alexie official website – http://www.fallsapart.com
Listen to an Mp3 excerpt from “Diary”
Read reviews from “Diary” - http://www.fallsapart.com/truediary.htm
Read essays written by Sherman Alexie - http://www.fallsapart.com/essays.html
Wright Library Holdings on works by Sherman Alexie:
“The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian”
- A54a 2007
“The Business of Fancydancing: Stories and Poems”
- A54bu 1992
“The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven”
813.54 A54L 2005
“One Stick Song”
811.54 A54on 2000
“Reservation Blues”
813.54 A54re 1995
“The Toughest Indian in the World”
813.54 A54t 2000
Films by Sherman Alexie available at Wright Library:
- Smoke Signals
- The Business of Fancydancing
