The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (review)

"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. Braving 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 he sees as inevitable for Indians who stay on the reservation. Meanwhile he shares 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 gives 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.