Plot Summary
Junior is a budding cartoonist growing up on the Spokane reservation. Life is tough enough with poverty (his self-portrait includes his K-mart t-shirt, Glad garbage book bag, and Safeway tennis shoes) and a family history of alcoholism, but Junior's got even more to contend with. He was born with water on the brain which left him with lopsided eyes and too many teeth. His only friend is the school bully, and he risks that friendship when he decides to leave the reservation school for a better education at the neighboring white school. Each day, Junior has to get himself to the all-white school twenty miles away (unreliable transportation, a sometimes drunk father, and no money for gas are all part of the struggle to get to school), and once he gets there, other than the school mascot, he’s the only Indian for miles. You might think Junior wouldn’t stand a chance--but he makes a friend or two, joins the basketball team and starts to make sense of his identity as someone who is of both places and neither. It is through the deaths of loved ones (Junior has attended forty-two funerals in his life) that Junior is able to feel the support of his community, both on the reservation and at his new school. Junior is an absolute original who will leave you cheering, crying, and laughing.
Critical Evaluation
The semi-autobiographical The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is Alexie's first young adult novel. The coming-of-age story addresses serious questions about friendship, isolation, love and loss, but it comes at them from the perspective of a funny and insightful fourteen year old boy whose life is surrounded by the bleakness of alcoholism, poverty, and the rest of the legacy of “the big stuff”, as Alexie puts it, of mass murder, loss of language and land. Junior aspires to be an artist, and the black and white comics interspersed throughout the novel (the work of cartoonist/ professional illustrator, Ellen Forney) are Junior’s reflections on his life. In his illustrations, Junior tackles the basics of all fourteen year old existences, including masturbation, girls, and zits, but he also has poetic insights into the nature of friendship between boys and how that changes over time, and the pain of being called a “white lover” when he leaves the reservation for a better education.
Reader’s Annotations
(Insert image of Junior’s self-portrait.) Watch Junior tackle it all with his cartoons and his basketball skills.
Information about the Author
According to the author’s website, “Sherman J. Alexie, Jr., was born in October 1966. A Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian, he grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, WA, about 50 miles northwest of Spokane, WA.
Born hydrocephalic, which means with water on the brain, Alexie underwent a brain operation at the age of 6 months and was not expected to survive. When he did beat the odds, doctors predicted he would live with severe mental retardation. Though he showed no signs of this, he suffered severe side effects, such as seizures, throughout his childhood. In spite of all he had to overcome, Alexie learned to read by age three, and devoured novels, such as John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, by age five. All these things ostracized him from his peers, though, and he was often the brunt of other kids' jokes on the reservation.
As a teenager, after finding his mother's name written in a textbook assigned to him at the Wellpinit school, Alexie made a conscious decision to attend high school off the reservation in Reardan, WA, about 20 miles south of Wellpinit, where he knew he would get a better education. At Reardan High he was the only Indian, except for the school mascot. There he excelled academically and became a star player on the basketball team. This experienced inspired his first young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian.”
Genre
Realistic Fiction
Curriculum Ties
N/A
Booktalking Ideas
Show Junior’s self-portrait and explain the risk that he takes (leaving the reservation school for Rearden High School).
Reading Level/Interest Age
Ages 14+
Challenge Issues
This book could be (and has been) challenged because of its references to masturbation. If the book were challenged, I would turn to ALA's Strategies and Tips for Dealing with Challenges to Library Materials.
Why Included?
This novel is a National Book Award winner by one of my favorite authors. That it a. touches on profound matters but is b. fun to read and c. short made it an essential read for me. I think that there are readers who might be willing to tackle this novel who don't generally read much, and so I wanted to include it in my collection.
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