Apple (Skin to the Core) by Eric Gansworth (review)

Gansworth, Eric Apple (Skin to the Core); written and illus. by Eric Gansworth and with photographs. Levine Querido, 2020 [352p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781646140138 $18.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R* Gr. 9 up

Having written a strongly autobiographical novel (If I Ever Get Out of Here, BCCB 9/13), writer and visual artist Gansworth turns here to straight-up memoir in a sequence of free-verse poems studded with art. "Apple" is the Native label for "Indians not sharp enough to make it all the way home, left in that space between two places. Red on the outside, white on the inside, forever locked away from both worlds," and Gansworth, an enrolled Onondaga member growing up in the Tuscarora reservation in New York, explores how his grandparents' experience with residential schools meant "tradition was considered a threat to our futures." As a kid growing up in the 1960s, young Eric lived in a tiny fire-prone house with no central heating or indoor plumbing, his father usually away doing steelwork in the city, and he struggled with being a dreamy, imaginative kid who loved comics and superheroes (appearing often in a Batman mask) and who was obsessed with the Beatles (whose work informs the book's structure and plays with the title conceit). The book's retrospection and sophistication place it at the high end of YA, but it's a searing yet dryly funny, at times intimate and at times highly literary picture of life hemmed in by majoritarian expectations and gutted by exploitation that made staying in the family home intolerable but leaving it unthinkable. Alongside Gansworth's account of a life he left but spent much of his adulthood reconstructing are mentions of a more buoyant trajectory for younger generations, who are reviving older traditions and reconnecting to a submerged past. This will speak to many young people torn between staying and going, trying to fit the story of their future into their family and culture's present and past. Poignant photographs, along with Gansworth's illustrations, appear occasionally, and "liner notes" give more detail.