Book Summary
Arnold Spirit, called Junior by his family lives on "poor ass Spokane Indian Reservation. Despite having serious health problems, hydrocephalus and seizures, Junior looks around at life on the reservation and decides he wants more. A teacher urges him to go to a white school, and he does. Even though he is despised by his friends and community, he knows he must do it in order to escape the curse of living on a reservation--alcoholism, poverty, second-rate education. When he goes to the white school in a nearby town he meets racism, but he eventually wins the students over with his good nature and determination. It doesn't hurt that he is smart-very smart. He enlists the aid of another bright student to help him fill in the gaps in his education. Junior even makes the varsity basketball team and discovers he is a great athlete. Even through the deaths of his beloved grandmother and older sister, he grieves but refuses to give up. Junior meets life with humor and wit. His cartoons help him express himself and escape the reality around him.
My Impressions
If I could just once have a student like Arnold Spirit, Junior, I could die satisfied. He is so hungry for knowledge that he is willing to let go of the familiarity and comfort of his rez life and pursue something better. I think Arnold has what many Native Americans don't--a view of the big picture and what it means. He would laugh to think about it, but I believe he wants to show other people on his reservation that there is still hope. Junior is a well-developed character. He is funny; he says, "During one week when I was little, Dad got stopped three times for DWI: Driving While Indian. He really thought about things; "So waht was I doing in racist Reardan, where more than half of every graduating class went to college?....Reardan was the opposite of the rez.It was the opposite of my family. It was the opposite of me." Alexei created a lovable, but realistic character in Arnold Spirit, Junior. I'd like to meet him.
Professional Review
Book Review. (2007). The absolutely true diary of a part-time Indian. Publishers Weekly, 254(33), 70-71.
Screenwriter, novelish and poet, Alexie bounds into YA with what might be a Native American equivalent of Angela's Ashes, a coming-of-age story so well observed that is very rootedness in one specific culture is also what lends it universality, and so emotionally honest that the humor almost always proves painful. Presented as the diary of hydrocephalic 14-year-old cartoonist and Spokane Indian, Arnold Spirit, Jr., the novel revolves around Junior's desperate hope of escaping the reservation. As he says of his drawings, "I think the world is a series of broken dams and floods, and my cartoons are little lifeboats." He transfers to a public school 22 miles away in a rich farm town where the only other Indian is the team mascot. Although his parents support his decision, everyone else on the rez sees him as a traitor, an apple ("red on the outside and white on the inside"), while at school most teachers and students project stereotypes onto him: "I was half Indian in one place and half white in the other." Readers begin to understand Junior's determination as, over the course of the school year, alcoholism and self-destructive behaviors lead to the deaths of close relatives. Unlike protagonists in many YA novels who reclaim or retain ethnic ties in order to find their true selves, Junior must separate from his tribe in order to preserve his identity. Jazzy syntax and Forney's witty cartoons examining Indian versus White attire and behavior transmute despair into dark humor; Alexie's no-holds-barred jokes have the effect of throwing the seriousness of his themes into high relief.
Library Uses
1. Create a book club for students and discuss this book in depth.
2. Ask students to create cartoons representing their part-time-ness. (part time Irish, part time Italian, part time Laotian, etc...)
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