by Sherman Alexie
Illustrations by Ellen Forney
BOOK OPINION
Any book that can make me laugh out loud and cry unabashedly deserves my highest praise. In The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, author Sherman Alexie mines his own adolescence to tell the story of Junior, aka Arnold Spirit. Junior has several decks stacked against him. He was born "with water on the brain," a condition that required a highly risky operation to treat and left him with speech issues and seizures. On top of that, Arnold is highly intelligent and sensitive, two traits that drop him squarely on the bottom of the pecking order on "the rez," the Spokane Indian Reservation. Dangerously close to despair, Arnold makes a desperate and impulsive decision to enroll at Reardon High School, an all-white high school in a well-to-do suburb of Spokane. The majority of the story is about how Arnold struggles to fit into the white and Indian worlds when neither will fully embrace him. Junior, blessed with intellectual gifts and a surprisingly consistent jump-shot, carves a niche for himself at the new school by forging key friendships. At the same time, he mourns the loss of his best friend Rowdy back on the rez, who sees Junior's defection as the ultimate sell-out. When Junior's first basketball game pits his Reardon team versus his old high school, a game played on the rez, it is almost too much for him to bear.
Awful things happen in the book, and it would be downright depressing if it weren't so damn funny at the same time. While Junior is certainly a bright, articulate individual, he is still a fourteen year-old kid who loves basketball, reading books, drawing comics, and masturbating. Ellen Forney, a Seattle-based comic artist, perfectly captures Junior's humor and world-view with her hilarious renderings. Most importantly, however, Sherman Alexie epitomizes the notion of laughing in order to keep from crying. He uses humor to illustrate the sadness, hopelessness, and sheer poverty of the people in Junior's world on the rez. At the same time, he allows Junior to cut loose in his frustration and rage, and the boy's anger at being rejected for simply bettering himself, saving himself, is palpable. The central relationship is between Junior and his best friend Rowdy. Their love-hate relationship is symbolic of many Big Ideas, but their identities are always authentic and potent. They are flawed individuals, but you care deeply for both of them, and want these two confused, hormonal, but ultimately loving ninth grade boys to just get back to the way they were. That their struggle with each other is so honest and compelling is a testament to Alexie's skill.
Sherman Alexie was awarded the National Book Award in the Young Adult Fiction category for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. It represents the best of YAF: powerful, uncompromising, authentic stories that deal with real conflicts and life-changing events. In the end, these heroes persevere, even if they are gawky, bespectacled, horny teenagers confronting an identity crisis at a ridiculously young age.
GRADE: A-
