Little, Brown Young Readers, 230 pages, ISBN 9780316013680
(photo credit: www.goodreads.com)
Awards:
National Book Award, Young People’s Literature, 2007
A School Library Journal Best Book of the Year, 2007
American Indian Library Association Award, 2007
Horn Book Fanfare Best Book, 2007
American Indian Youth Literature Awards, 2008
ALA’s Top Ten Best Books for Young Adults, 2008
Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Fiction and Poetry, 2008
Annotation: Junior finds out that moving from a Native American reservation school to an all-white school can be almost as crazy as the cartoons he draws.
Booktalk:
The next morning, Dad drove me the twenty-two miles to Reardan.
“I’m scared,” I said.
“I’m scared, too,” Dad said.
He hugged me close. His breath smelled like mouthwash and lime vodka.
“You don’t have to do this,” he said. “You can always go back to the rez school.”
“No,” I said. “I have to do this.”
Can you imagine what would have happened to me if I’d turned around and gone back to the rez school?
I would have been pummeled. Mutilated. Crucified.
You can’t just betray your tribe and then change your mind ten minutes later. I was on a one-way bridge. There was no way to turn around, even if I wanted to.
“Just remember this,” my father said. “Those white people aren’t better than you.”
But he was so wrong. And he knew he was wrong.
Despite hard times and being dumped on by just about everyone in his life, Junior finds strength that he didn’t know he had. Between Junior’s LOL narration and his insane cartoons (which are included in the book), it’s next to impossible not to like The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.
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