‘The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian’ by Sherman Alexie creates a world in which Junior, a teenager and hopeful cartoonist, feels stuck. Growing up on the Spokane Indian reservation is not all fun and games, as he shows through carefully constructed cartoons that readers can view throughout the book. Aside from his best friend Rowdy and his own family, everyone picks on him. A series of events transpire, including his sister moving away, some bullies getting the better of him, and more of the like, and Junior decides his only way out of the muck he feels he’s stuck in by staying in Wellpinit on the reservation is to do the only thing he can do to rid himself of his troubles – leave. So he does, and ends up in Reardan, where he starts off his freshman year feeling very unlucky in life despite the lingering hope that making this change will only make things better.

Little does he expect that things will have to get much worse to have a chance of getting better. At first, no one wants to accept him at Reardan, and everyone on the reservation, except for his family, basically shuns him. This includes Rowdy, who even though he has always been on Junior’s side, goes full force against him for leaving, even though Junior tried to get Rowdy to come along and go to school with him in Reardan. It really is quite bothersome how Junior considers Rowdy to still be his best friend, especially due to Rowdy’s anger and torment toward Junior as the novel progresses. It does seem only natural that someone wouldn’t want to give up on and lose his best friend, but Rowdy’s behavior toward Junior is nothing short of verbally and physically abusive, and Junior’s holding on to hope that he and Rowdy will be able to patch things up is a sad testament to the idea that you can truly go home, because, as Alexie makes pretty evident, home is not necessarily where you lay your head. Junior finds that home is more a state of mind as he tries to make sense of the world around him, including new people he encounters in Reardan, and how he copes with figuring out how to portray himself so he is seen as more than just a stereotype.

Alexie’s venture into the young adult genre is more than welcome, as his ‘The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven’ was a different genre, yet equally compelling and relevant. It is always nice to see authors take on and win at new genres.

You can find ‘The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian’ by Sherman Alexie here.