My immediate response to the news of this book's publication was, "Yay, Sherman Alexie wrote a YA novel!" I bought it in hardcover and gobbled it up in about two days. Later, I heard Alexie had commented that maybe he should have been writing YA all along. My response to that? Amen.
Alexie's protagonist in his first foray into the world of YA-lit. is a precocious fourteen-year-old artist named Junior who lives on a Spokane Indian reservation where, he quips, "I belong to the Black Eye of the Month Club."
Yes, Junior is sharp, and his sharpness is funny, but it is also bitter and achingly vulnerable, as shown most poignantly through his cartoons. The novel is a mixture of his conversational insights--written in an endearing, biting voice that never falters--and school-notebook-type doodles in which he caricatures, dissects, accuses, mocks, skewers, implores, and champions the cast of characters that peoples his life. Finding words "too unpredictable," Junior draws "because I want to talk to the world," he says. "And I want the world to pay attention to me."
Junior attracts plenty of attention when he decides to leave the reservation high school and enroll at the nearest "white" school, which is still a good 20 miles away: a distance he ends up walking on more than one occasion when his dad is too drunk to drive or too broke to buy gas. While Junior doesn't fit in much better with his off-reservation classmates than he did with the kids he grew up with, at the same time his best (only) friend Rowdy now sees him as an uppity defector and stops speaking to him.
This is not your ordinary trouble-with-friends teen-angst book, however. Junior deals with some serious stuff that many kids don't face--hunger, poverty, violence, alcohol-related deaths and crimes--as well as the pressures and cruelties that most kids do. Through it all, his fearless narrating and merciless cartoons introduce us to a boy who often wields the blade of his wit at his own expense yet is always ready to bulldoze anyone or anything that threatens his dignity--including his own propensity to hold himself back.
All I have to say is, thank you, Mr. Alexie, for joining the YA party. We're so glad you came.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian was published by Little, Brown. Copyright 2007 by Sherman Alexie. Illustrations copyright 2007 by Ellen Forney.
