Review by Booklist Review
This intriguing combination of fiction and nonfiction is a worthy follow-up to The Grass Dancer (1994). Part 1 is a collection of seven urban stories. The characters, mainly women, share a Sioux heritage and the difficulties that this heritage presents in a white world--a man leaves his wife and daughter in Chicago to search for a more "gung-ho Indian" lifestyle; a young couple relocates to Chicago to escape the prejudices of the reservation; a young Indian woman at Harvard struggles to incorporate tradition into her college routine. Part 2 is nonfiction, five interconnected autobiographical snapshots of the lives of the author's parents and of her childhood in Chicago, told with the same graceful lyricism and echoing many of the themes of the preceding fiction. Power, a descendant of America's founding fathers on one side and an Indian chief on the other, is in a unique position to illustrate the complicated process of living "the Indian way" in today's world. --Carrie Bissey
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Power continues to explore her Native American heritage in this short story collection, a poignant, evocative follow-up to her PEN/Hemingway Award-winning first book, The Grass Dancer. Many of the stories have dual settings involving Sioux protagonists who have emigrated from North Dakota to Chicago, starting with the title story, which tells of a young girl's longings for her father after he abandons her mother and the girl's two siblings. Family ties are another connecting thread: "Watermelon Seeds" is a familiar story about a 16-year-old girl who tries to battle her mother's disapproval after her older boyfriend gets her pregnant; "Beaded Soles" is a taut, unusual tale in which a woman murders her husband after a difficult relocation to Chicago and a miscarriage. Power effectively uses vivid, colorful Native American imagery and myths in the longer stories, but several of the shorter entries are fragmented and shakier-"The Attic" is an ordinary account of some intriguing heirlooms that a woman finds among her family's artifacts, while "Chicago Waters" is a better, more complex series of musings about the perils and potential of swimming in Lake Michigan. The author displays a greater sense of narrative command here than in her debut, which allows her to take risks with her conceits and story lines. Occasionally she veers toward clichs of Native American fiction, but her confident voice marks her as a writer with potential. Author tour. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Power's first book, The Grass Dancer, featured tales of life on the reservation and won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Roofwalker, this year's winner of the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, focuses mainly on the lives of Native Americans and mixed bloods living away from the reservation, mostly in Power's native Chicago. Part fiction, part autobiography, these stories show what it's like to live between two worlds. In the title story, a nine-year-old girl struggles as her father, a "gung-ho Indian," leaves his job at the Indian Center in Chicago to return to his native South Dakota, taking with him not his family but a young girlfriend. "First Fruits" tells the story of a young woman's initial days at Harvard, beginning with the orientation tour, where her father surprises everyone with his knowledge of the first Native students, thereby giving his daughter a support group of ancestors. In "The Attic," when 11-year-old Susan and her Dakota mother clean out the attic at the home of Susan's paternal grandmother, who had just moved to a nursing home, they find documents from ancestors who signed the Declaration of Independence and fought in the American Revolution. This collection of moving, well-written tales is recommended for literary fiction collections. Debbie Bogenschutz, Cincinnati State Technical & Community Coll. Lib., OH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Twelve pieces, a combination of fiction and nonfiction, describe life among Native Americans who have left the reservations and entered mainstream society. Power (the novel Grass Dancer, 1994), a Sioux who grew up in Chicago and studied at Harvard, writes pretty closely of her own experience, to such an extent that her pieces seem as much a set of variations on a theme as a collection of separate tales. The narrators are mostly young women of Sioux/Dakota origin living in urban centers far removed (both spiritually and geographically) from the reservations and tribal homelands of their ancestors. The title story, for example, describes the unhappy domestic life of a Sioux family in Chicago: Told by a girl, it portrays the quiet trauma when an Indian-rights organizer leaves his wife and family and returns to the reservation-ostensibly to do political work, but in reality to seek a new life with his girlfriend. Some stories examine the tensions of mixed marriages. "Watermelon Seeds" is an account of a Mexican-American girl from Chicago who becomes pregnant by a Chippewa from Wisconsin, while "The Attic" sorts through the family histories of a half-Sioux, half-Irish-American girl who finds some resonance in the history of persecution among her ancestors on both sides of her family. "Angry Fish" is an excursion into magic-realism, introducing us to Mitchell Black Deer, a Sioux in Chicago who becomes friendly with a talking statue of St. Jude. Other pieces concern the relation between past and present: The narrator of "First Fruits" (a Harvard freshman, a Sioux) becomes so intrigued by the story of the first Indian to graduate from the college (in 1655) that she begins to see him on campus, while the young narrator of "Museum Indians" visits the Natural History Museum in Chicago to see the Indian dress donated by her Dakota grandmother. An interesting perspective on an unfamiliar world. Tales that are well crafted but ultimately rather repetitive.
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