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Indian country is presented in all its flamboyant glory in this fast-paced mystery that introduces a character soon to become familiar and well-loved by readers of mystery: Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn of the Navaho Tribal Police. So, too, is Indian lore as Leaphorn and anthropologist Bergen McKee track a killer who leaves a corpse with a mouth full of sand, but no other clues and no trail -- the dread Navaho Wolf-Witch. The Legendary Lieutenant's apprentice Jim Chee has not yet been invented in this first volume of what will become one of the finest series of its kind.

Reviewed by Jim B., Main Library

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This is a beautifully written tale of one woman's journey into herself and her heritage. Hogan, acclaimed Chickasaw poet and novelist, brings to life five generations of Native American women in the Boundary Waters between Minnesota and Canada. Angel, the youngest of these women, returns to the land of her painful childhood to reconnect with her family and herself. Along with her grandmother, great grandmother and great, great grandmother, Angel sets out to stop the building of a dam which will flood her people's homelands, and also to confront the mother that had viciously abused her as a young child. This becomes Angel's journey into herself, her discovery of the power of women, and a deep bonding experience for all those involved. A moving and poetic novel, Solar Storms is one of the best novels of the 1990's.

Reviewed by Mark B., Main Library

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Best known for his poetry and his books for children, Native American author Simon J. Ortiz here brings together a collection of 26 of his short stories. Taken separately, each story is a snapshot of a moment or event in the life of one person or family. Together they give us a window into contemporary life among Native Americans of the Southwest. An Acoma Pueblo, Ortiz uses his mastery of the telling of tales to take us on a trip through his world. Among the most moving of the stories is the title tale of a tribal elder whose son gives him his first television just as Neil Armstrong is taking his famous walk on the moon. This tale, "Men on the Moon", points to the magic of that event, but also hints at its meaninglessness in the lives of most of us. This is a beautiful book, a joy to read, and a lesson in humanity.

Reviewed by Mark B., Main Library

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Sam Hunter is hiding from his old life as Samson Hunts Alone, a Crow Indian. Twenty years earlier when Sam was living on an Indian reservation in Montana, he got into trouble with the law and went on the run. He wound up in Santa Barbara and settled into the safe, ordered life of a yuppie insurance salesman. In abandoning his Native American heritage, Sam also abandoned the silly superstitions taught him by his Uncle Pokey. The Native American trickster god Coyote has other plans, however. When Coyote enters Sam’s life, order turns to chaos, and he is awakened from his complacency and banal existence. Filled with humor, wry cultural observations and plenty of supernatural hijinks, Coyote Blue is a fun and amusing read.

Reviewed by Bryon C., North County Regional

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This fascinating book is based on a fragment of truth: around 1854 a prominent Northern Cheyenne chief requested that the U.S. provide the men of his tribe with 1,000 white “brides”. Fearing extinction through war, his purpose was to assimilate his people into white culture through the tribe’s practice of raising children in the mother’s tribe. In reality, the U.S. government refused the request. Fergus, however, writes so convincingly that this reader had no trouble suspending disbelief that such a transition could occur. Subsequent betrayals by the U.S. government of the Native Americans and their white wives and children offer a heartbreaking portrayal of Native American traditional life coming to a horrific end. May Dodd and her journals, however, leave a surprising legacy.

Reviewed by Michele H., Main Library

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When Will returns to his hometown, Medicine River, Alberta, he thinks he has only come to bury his mother. This little Canadian town, just outside the Blackfoot reservation, represents nothing but the dead and dying past to Will. It holds nothing for Will any longer, and he will be leaving as soon as possible, or so he thinks. Harlan Bigbear, Will’s friend and a bit of a trickster, has other plans for Will and the town. Imagine an Indian Mark Twain and you have a pretty good idea of King’s style and depth: he writes with a wonderful mix of knee-slapping humor, biting sarcasm, and right-on-the-mark social commentary.

Reviewed by Mark B., Main Library

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The winters were bitterly cold on Montana's Flathead Indian Reservation in the 1940s, but Louise White Elk seems warmed by a fire within. Fiercely independent and dangerously stubborn, Louise is like the calm around with a tempest rages. For her, this tempest is a tripartite: Charlie Kicking Woman, the Indian policeman who seems divided by his duty to the job and his Native heritage; Harvey Stoner, the white man who seems to all but own the town of Perma; and Baptiste Yellow Knife, an Indian that refuses the white man's world. Louise is determined that she will be the only one with any say in her life, but as always, the world, and the people in it, find ways to work inside her soul.

Reviewed by Mark B., Main Library

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Funny, sharp and insightful are a few words that describe these stories. Most of the main characters are, like the author, Spokane Indians living in Seattle. Alexie refuses to romanticize the world of Native Americans, filling it instead with real people – students, salesmen, housewives, and drunks, but no peace pipes. One story tells of Corliss, a college student whose peers had teased her about her love of poetry. She is ecstatic to discover a book of poems by a fellow Spokane in her college library. Finding this man becomes her quest. Another tells of Frank Snake Church, who gave up basketball and a scholarship when his mother died. At 40, mourning his father’s death, Frank uses the game he loves to honor his parents. Spokane in the particulars of their lives, these characters are universal in spirit.

Reviewed by Mark B., Main Library

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Nasdijj adopted Awee knowing the child and both of his parents had AIDS. He also knew that Awee needed love more than anything else. Love and the power of his anger are Nasdijj’s fuel. Pediatric AIDS is tragic under the best of circumstances. Awee did not live under the best of circumstances; he lived on the Navajo reservation. On the rez healthcare, what little is available, is poor at best. Nasdijj exposes this situation for the unconscionable crime that it is. Nasdijj has plenty of reasons to be angry, and he is, but it is his deep and abiding love that really shines here. With direct and poetic language Nasdijj shares his anger, but also his deep and abiding love for the beauty that was Awee.

Reviewed by Mark B., Main Library

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Reader's comments about this book

This story is very touching.
-Ashley, Charlotte, NC

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Novelist Louise Erdrich here presents a collection of new and selected older poems that demonstrate her deep love of life, language and all the worlds that surround us – physical and spiritual. This is her first book of poems in 14 years, and it is well worth the wait. From story poems about the trickster Potchikoo to those that delve into the incredible bond between mother and child, Erdrich reveals that poetry, its language and its spirit, lies at the core of her writing and her being. With beauty and power she lays before us her life force – her original fire.

Reviewed by Mark B., Main Library

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Diane Glancy, a novelist of Cherokee and English-German descent, gives Sacajawea a voice to tell her own tale. Presented as Sacajawea’s journal alongside which are excerpts from the journals of both Lewis and Clark. This juxtaposition allows the reader to see the many differences, and similarities, of the cultures represented. Glancy is careful here not to judge either Native or Euro-American cultures, they speak for themselves. In each there is good and bad. It is, indeed, this very honesty and fairness to all that gives the small book its power. In following Sacajawea from the Mandan Village in North Dakota to the Pacific and back, the reader sees to the very human heart of the woman who has become something of an American myth.

Reviewed by Mark B., Main Library

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Erdrich returns to the Ojibwe world that she has painted so beautifully in earlier novels. This tale centers around Fleur Pillager, one of her most complex, enigmatic characters. Fleur takes the name of her mother, Four Souls, for power when she sets out seeking revenge against the white lumber baron, James Mauser. Mauser cheated her and many Ojibwe out of their tribal lands. Typical of Erdrich's multivoiced style, we hear the tale from Nanapush the trickster and Fleur’s grandfather, his wife Margaret, and Mauser’s sister-in-law Polly Elizabeth. It is a tale that turns, like life, from pain to laughter and back in a heartbeat. Fleur always gets what she seeks, but at a price. Louise Erdrich is a literary treasure who sees and reveals the human soul for the chaotic and beautiful entity it is.

Reviewed by Mark B., Main Library

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When Rachel Winnapee, orphaned teenage Native American, is sent to work for the wealthy March Family of Northern Michigan, taking care of Woody is one of her responsibilities. Woody is a handsome soldier who returned wounded from World War II. The two soon fall in love and conceive a child only to be forced apart. Rachel must raise her son with only the help of midwives and a Native American friend. The world, however, seems to force Rachel back to the March estate. This bittersweet, character-driven love story parallels the lives of the reckless March family with Rachel’s struggling Native American clan until, by story’s end the March family’s fate rests with Rachel and her son. Written with such clarity that you feel you’re standing beside Rachel all the way.

Reviewed by Amy S., Sugar Creek Branch

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