Drawing on Sherman Alexie’s personal experience growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is a young adult novel that has more to say about big virtues like tolerance than a whole shelf of earnest adult tomes could ever manage. The book’s unflinching candor, irreverent comedy, and fierce alertness to difficult issues have made it a subject of controversy and a frequent target for book-banning school boards. But what’s most valuable about it is that Alexie’s novel is controversial in the way life itself is controversial: unsettled, uneasy, of two minds about itself and nevertheless ongoing, devastating one day and comic the next.
Alexie explores hard realities in an easy to read, almost humorous way that not only opens the reader's eyes to the difficulty of life on reservations but makes them think about how such truths relate to their own lives as well.
I really like Alexie's writing. A very funny but sad look at an adolescent Indian boy coming of age who seems to be attacked on all sides but he does find friends. I'm so glad he had his grandmother to show him what it means to be tolerant, which most people on the res were not to him.
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