Awards
2016 American Indian Youth Literature Awards winning Young Adult novel.
Fiction
- Undefeated: Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian School Football Team - Steve Sheinkin
- Sweetgrass Basket - Marlene Carvell
- Code Talkers - Joseph Bruchac
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The House of Purple Cedar by Tim Tingle is set in pre-statehood Oklahoma (Indian Territory) in the final years of the nineteenth century, this novel travels from the poignant, even tragic, to the comic, while covering a community of Choctaw Indians and their white neighbors (nahullos), not excluding spirits. Tingle, a Choctaw author of several children’s books, creats a wonderful, well-deeloped character in Rose, who as a child witnesses the 1896 New Year’s Eve burning of the New Hope Academy for Girls, causing the death of a deaf friend as well as nineteen of other girls. Her tale begins, “Let us now talk of Skullyville,” the eastern Oklahoma town where, along with the larger community of Spiro, the action unfolds. Rose’s grandfather William Goode is attacked without provocation by the drunken town marshal, Hardwicke, an evil bully, who becomes the center of the story. Awards 2016 American Indian Youth Literature Awards winning Young Adult novel. If you are interested the the schools for Native Americans, try these titles that are part of the TAHS Library collection.
Fiction
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Joseph Bruchac is a Native American author who uses his Abenaki ancestry to write about native people in ancient, as well as, modern times. The first book I read by Bruchac was Code Talker: A Novel About the Navajo Marines of World War II. It was a powerful book about the contributions of the Navajo to the war effort in the Pacific. Despite the brutal nature of the battle scenes, Bruchac also inculdes bits of humor such as the narrator's comment that, with a name like the Marines, he should have realized there would be water involved in their work. The Navajo, of course, lived in the desert and none of the men who were training to be radiomen had ever learned to swim.
His post-apocalyptic series Killer of Enemies is about a seventeen-year-old Apache hunter Lozen and her family. They live in a world of haves and have nots. There are the Ones, people so augmented with technology and genetic enhancements that they are barely human and almost immortal, and there is everyone else who serve them. Then the Cloud comes, and everything changes. Technology stops working. The world plunges back into a new steam age. The Ones’ pets, genetically engineered monsters, turn on them and are now loose in the world. Lozen was not one of the lucky ones pre-C, but her a unique set of survival skills and magical abilities make her useful to the Ones. She hunts monsters who survived the apocalyptic events of the Cloud, thereby ensuring the safety of her kidnapped family. The second book in the series is Trail of the Dead. Lozen and her family are looking for a place of refuge from the Ones. Lozen, her family, and her allies travel in search of a valley where her family once found a peaceful home When they finally reach the valley, they discover an unpleasant surprise awaiting them and a merciless hunter following close behind. Relying on her wits and the growing powers that warn her when enemies are near, Lozen fights internal sickness to lead her band of refugees to freedom and safety. There is prequel e-novella called Rose Eagle that tells the story of a Lakota medicine woman and her people who had been forced to work for the Ones mining ore to finance their wars. Although the story is set before Killer of Enemies, Rose and her people will befriend Lozen's group in Trail of the Dead. The third book is Arrow of Lightning. Months after she has been healed from the Enemy Sickness that afflicted her in Trail of the Dead, Lozen and her family have gathered a community around them in Valley Where First Light Paints the Cliffs and have begun to rebuild. Lozen knows danger still stalks them and she intends to be ready to defend her people, but she hopes to avoid killing another human being--though gemod monsters are not off the table. Miles away, the remaining Ones plot Lozen's demise, and a threat Lozen thought she'd eliminated comes closer. And a newfound power will complicate everything for Lozen. Other dystopian/post-apocalyptic stories in the TAHS library that you might enjoy include the following:
Awards
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AuthorI am a former high school English teacher and now a high school librarian. Archives
November 2019
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