BOOKS OF THE MONTH
Check back each month for our selections for Native American Books of the Month.  We have a wide variety of appropriate reading materials for children and adults covering various aspects of Native American culture and history, fiction and non-fiction.  You can use your library to check these books out or you can simply stop by your local bookstore and purchase them.  Any questions may be directed to our office at 716-816-3183.

Here are some great selections for your autumn reading entertainment.

The books of the month for October & November 2009 are:

1. Grades Kindergarten to 3rd:  "Grandmother's Pigeon" by Louise-Erdrich, illustrated by Jim LaMarche, published by Hyperion, 1999, 32 pages.
Amazon.com Review:
The mystical and the natural blend superbly in this first children's book by the accomplished literary novelist Louise Erdrich. The eccentric, well-traveled grandmother of two young kids decamps in mid-vacation, riding a porpoise to Greenland and leaving behind a trove of strange treasures and artifacts including a collection of bird's nests and three old eggs which hatch, marvelously, into passenger pigeons. Erdrich wields her Native American ancestry and her worldiness--Grandmother owns an original Klee--to give young readers a sense of the world's wonders and the wisdom of the elders, the old wisdom of the natural cycles that we are losing. A letter from Grandmother, promising to return, winds up this fetching tale.

2. Grades 4th to 8th:  "The Return of Skeleton Man" by Joseph Bruchac, published by Harper Collins Publishers, 2006, 144 pages.
Booklist Review:
Even readers unfamiliar with the popular horror story Skeleton Man (2001) will have no problem understanding this sequel. Molly, the contemporary Mohawk protagonist of the earlier book, is haunted by her memories of what happened when the skeleton monster kidnapped her and her parents. Now the teenager is at a huge, fancy lodge in upper New York State, where her father is attending a business conference, and Skeleton Man is after them again, in the dark corridors and along the trails. Molly narrates the story, which blends Mohawk tradition and legend with contemporary details ("Indian telepathy is O.K," but Molly also needs her cell phone and drives a bulldozer) as it follows Molly's struggle to rout the monster yet again. Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved.

3. Grades High School to Adult:  "On The Rez" by Ian Frazier, published by Picador, 2001, 320 pages.
Amazon.com Review:
Given that the Great Plains long functioned as a stomping ground for the Oglala Sioux, it was inevitable that Ian Frazier would cross paths with them when he wrote his 1989 chronicle of that sublime flatland. But the encounter between the self-confessed "chintzy middle-class white guy" and his Native American counterparts went so swimmingly that Crazy Horse assumed a starring role in the book. Now Frazier continues his cross-cultural romance in On the Rez. This account of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota is as touching, funny, and maniacally digressive as anything he's written. What's more, he manages to avoid most of the politically correct potholes along the way, producing a vivid, ambivalent (i.e., honest) portrait of a community where the very "landscape is dense with stories."

On the Rez delivers a history of the Oglala nation that spotlights our paleface population in some of its most shameful, backstabbing moments, as well as a quick tour through Indian America. The latter, to be honest, seems a little too conscientiously cooked up from primary sources and news clippings. But elsewhere Frazier is in superb form, reporting everything he sees and hears with enviable clarity and promptly pulling the rug out from under himself whenever he seems too omniscient. Few accounts of reservation life have been this comical; even fewer have moved beyond the poverty and pandemic drunk driving to discern actual, theological wickedness on the premises: "At such moments a sense of compound evil--the evil of the human heart, in league with the original darkness of this wild continent--curls around me like shoots of a fast-growing vine." In the hands of many a writer, the previous sentence might resemble a rhetorical firecracker. In Frazier's, it comes off as a statement of fact--which is only one of the reasons why every American, Native or not, should take a look at this sad, splendid, and surprisingly hopeful book. --James Marcus

These selections were made by Staff