November is Native American Heritage month! So, we’ve selected a few titles of new fiction from brilliant Native American authors. Happy reading!
A 12-year-old boy named Wyatt is taken into foster care by a couple, Maria and Ernest. Years earlier, the couple’s son Ray-Ray was killed by a police officer. With the arrival of the young boy in their home uncanny resemblances of Ray-Ray begin to reveal themselves. Both of their other children, Sonja and Edgar, have their own struggles with the past and present. Alternating first-person narrations are interspersed with narrations from a long dead relative, Tsala, who experienced the Trail of Tears. This is a spiritual and ghostly novel that unflinchingly glares at the pain of loss and the difficulties of healing a family.
The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones
Ten years prior, a group of four young men living on the Blackfeet reservation shot at an elk heard, killing many. The land they were on was sacred and reserved for tribal elders. Now the men are in their 30s and have moved away from the reservation. But Lewis, one of them men who committed the egregious act on sacred ground, is having unsettling visions. He suspects these visions are of the unborn elk calf they killed so many years ago. The other men also start to see similar visions. The haunting creature shifts forms and now the hunters have become the hunted. Jones uses spare prose to create an ethereal horror tale full of shadows of the past.
Two Feathers Fell from the Sky by Margaret Verble
A young woman named Two Feathers performs as a horse-diver at the zoo in Nashville in 1929. When a sinkhole suddenly opens, it swallows Two Feathers and her horse. She then she discovers that the zoo is built on Native American burial grounds. With a dead horse, herself severely injured, and her future now in question, Two Feathers encounters an ancient spirit who watches over her. Verble steeps this novel in the historic era and touches on themes true to the time. Working conditions, race, and class are all intricately woven throughout the novel. This is an ambitious work from an award-winning writer.
-Mike
E-content from the New Hampshire Downloadable Books Consortium:
Brandon Hobson; Stephen Graham Jones; Margaret Verble
E-content from Hoopla:
Howe's Book Valet 