Sherman Alexie's Part-Time Indian can help pre-teens understand and empathize with a world that is cruel to many people

Since my daughter is now 10, it occurs to me that there won't necessarily be a whole slew of nights left when I get the chance to read to and with her before bedtime. Back in March, I wrote about one of my favorite authors, Sherman Alexie, and how he has a modern classic book that is nearly perfect for pre-teens:

Next on my list from Alexie is his young-adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, from 2007. It’s listed in 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, which notes its revered status as a favorite on banned-book lists by school boards. It’s “controversial in the way life itself is controversial: unsettled, uneasy … devastating one day and comic the next.” Alexie also won the 2009 Odyssey Award for his reading of it as the year’s best audiobook.

We finished it tonight and the novel gets two major thumbs-ups from me and my daughter. Although most people will be attracted by the banned-book designation, there will be a handful of racists and prudes who will consider it a badge of honor towards their U.S. patriotism to not approve of this book. (There are a couple of sections about masturbation and other teen tomfoolery that I kind of mumbled through, but certainly nothing that is bannable and the tale itself is never less than page-turning.)

We read the 10th-anniversary edition and Alexie added details in a postscript about how the narrator, Arnold Spirit Jr., also known as "Junior," was more-than-a-little based off his own early-teen years. Junior is an aspiring cartoonist and good basketball player who decides to leave his Spokane reservation to attend a white high school. This irritates many on the rez, especially his best friend Rowdy, who is based off Alexie's best friend growing up named Randy, who would later die as an adult when he wasn't wearing his seat belt in a car crash.

Because of Junior's balancing act between the worlds of Native Americans and whites, I've never read a better description of the many ways it must feel alienating to live in the U.S. as members of reservation communities. The descriptions of alcohol abuse, violence and bullying, and abject poverty are harrowing.

Alexie began writing it as a memoir but then was convinced by an editor to turn it into a young-adult novel. Still, he noted that it's "about 78 percent" a true story. From the first sentence, when Junior informs us he was "born with water on the brain," Alexie opens up an entire world of a poor person with a disability and all kinds of other issues to deal with that, in my mind, can help prepare a pre-teen for the world and all the empathy that is needed to survive healthily within it.

5 out of 5 stars