Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian

Alternately sidesplitting and heartbreaking, and sometimes both at the same, this is a wonderfully alive depiction of a Native American teenager torn between the reservation and school in a small white farming town. It does not shy away from looking at alcoholism and death, but makes the first so humanly understandable and the second so movingly bewildering that it transcends the boundaries of YA literature.

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