National Book Award Finalist: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

On November 14, during Children's Book Week, the National Book Award for Young People's Literature will be awarded to one of five finalists. The post below reviews Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, (Little, Brown & Company, 2007) one of the five.

Arnold ("Junior") Spirit was born with a few strikes against him. A hydrocephalic baby, Arnold was not expected to survive the procedure which successfully drained the fluid but left him "susceptible to seizure activity," As he grows up, he is forced to wear weird black plastic eyeglasses, the only style available from the Spokane Indian Reservation dispensary. Arnold is incredibly skinny, with huge feet, "a capital L walking down the road." Equipped with a stutter and a lisp, he is called "retard" and bullied and beaten up by the reservation tough guys, a charter member of what he terms "the Black-Eye-of-the-Month Club." Arnold simultaneously loves and seeks escape from his alcoholic parents and depressed, agoraphobic sister Mary, but his main refuge is his skill at cartooning and the protection of his rough and tough best friend Rowdy, with whom he cries and laughs and fights throughout their childhood.

Despite the look of a loser, Arnold is a warrior at heart, a bright and tough kid who is surprisingly possessed of a wicked jump shot in basketball. When his ninth-grade teacher urges him to go outside the reservation for his education, Arnold transfers to a well-to-do farm town high school, earns the friendship of sports hero Roger, class genius Howard, and the absolutely gorgeous and very white Penelope. Arnold discovers he's the second smartest kid in the freshman class and guts it out to lead the basketball team to a championship with his fierce defensive skills and surprising three-point jump shots.

Still, being a part-time Indian is hard on Arnold. Sometimes walking or hitching the 22 miles to school when his parents don't have money for gas, Arnold manages to excel in class. Rowdy and the kids back at the reservation school hate him for going "Apple" (red on the outside, white on the inside), and most of the white kids in town think he's a freak. Arnold hates the drunken hopelessness of the rez, a force which causes the death of his grandmother, his father's best friend, and his sister Mary before his freshman year is over. Torn by feelings of disloyalty to his family, Arnold finds himself inexplicably crying or laughing wildly through his freshman year. Still, a kind of hope continues to grow inside Arnold as he takes Penelope to the big dance and renews his friendship with Rowdy even as they plot their future rivalry on the basketball court.

The Absolutely True Diary of A Part-Time Indian is such a truly funny, desperately sad, and totally honest story that it is almost impossible to put down. Arnold is every weird, dorky, all-wrong kid with a zit on his nose who ever suffered the awkwardness of adolescence--and that's the white side of his life. On the Indian side, he's a resilient, hopeful spirit, constantly split down the middle between his love for his family and the people he knows there and his desire to escape from their boozy and hopeless downward spiral and into a flawed but nevertheless more promising white world. It's an intimate first-person narrative of a kid who is as funny as a crutch and as endearing as a muddy puppy.

Ellen Forney's "Arnold" cartoons which liberally illustrate the book could practically stand alone as a graphic novel of Arnold's coming of age. This is a novel well deserving of being named a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award, one which should find its place with the best of its genre for a long time to come.