The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Alexie, Sherman.  The Absolutely True Diary of A Part-Time Indian. New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2009.

ISBN: 9780316013680 | Paperback | 230 p. | $9.99 USD

Annotation: Sherman Alexie chronicles the struggles of Junior, a teen growing up on an Indian reservation near Spokane, Washington.  When Junior decided to go to a school off of the reservation, he struggles to find his place in two very different worlds.

Awards / Honors:

- Amazon.com Best Book of the Year

- Boston Globe Horn Book Award: Fiction and Poetry

- California Young Reader Medal: Young Adult

- Kirkus Reviews Best YA Book

- National Book Award for Young People's Literature

- New York Times Bestseller

- Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year

- School Library Journal Best Books: 2007

- YALSA Best Books for Young Adults: 2008

- YALSA Outstanding Books for the College Bound - HIstory and Cultures: 2009

Snap and Read Booktalk:  Junior lives on an Indian reservation, in world thats very segregated from the towns just beyond the borders.  He's smart, way too smart for the schools on the rez, so he decides he wants to go to a better school, twenty-two miles away.  He knows he'll get a better education in Rearden, but being the only Indian boy isn't going to be easy:

"Then the white kids began arriving for school.  They surrounded me.  Those kids weren't just white.  They were translucent.  I could see the blue veins running through their skin like rivers.  Most of the kids were my size or smaller, but there were ten or twelve monster dudes.  Giant white guys. The looked like men, not boys.  They had to be seniors. Some of them looked like they had to shave two or three times a day.  They stared at me, the Indian boy with a black eye and swollen nose, my going away gifts from Rowdy. Those white kids couldn't believe their eyes.  They stared at me like I was Bigfoot or a UFO.  What was I doing at Reardan, whose mascot was an Indian, thereby making me the only other Indian in town?" (p. 56)

Will Junior manage to make his way at this new school? Learn what happens to Junior as he ventures off the reservation in search of a better life.

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