We Still Belong
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- €8.49
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- €8.49
Publisher Description
A thoughtful and heartfelt middle grade novel by American Indian Youth Literature Honor–winning author Christine Day (Upper Skagit), about a girl whose hopeful plans for Indigenous Peoples’ Day (and plans to ask her crush to the school dance) go all wrong—until she finds herself surrounded by the love of her Indigenous family and community at an intertribal powwow.
Wesley is proud of the poem she wrote for Indigenous Peoples’ Day—but the reaction from a teacher makes her wonder if expressing herself is important enough. And due to the specific tribal laws of her family’s Nation, Wesley is unable to enroll in the Upper Skagit tribe and is left feeling “not Native enough.” Through the course of the novel, with the help of her family and friends, she comes to embrace her own place within the Native community.
Christine Day's debut, I Can Make This Promise, was an American Indian Library Association Youth Literature Award Honor Book, was named a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus, School Library Journal, the Chicago Public Library, and NPR, and was also picked as a Charlotte Huck Honor Book. Her sophomore novel, The Sea in Winter, was an American Indian Library Association Youth Literature Award Honor Book, as well as named a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus and School Library Journal.
We Still Belong is an accessible, enjoyable, and important novel from an author who always delivers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
During a "rough patch," 12-year-old Wesley Wilder and her mother move into her maternal grandfather's house in an Indigenous community outside of Seattle, which he shares with Wesley's aunt, uncle, and baby cousin. Seeking a place to fit in at her new school, Wesley joins the Native/Indigenous Student Union and the Gamer's Club, where she meets and crushes hard on white classmate Ryan. But when a teacher harshly criticizes a poem she writes celebrating Indigenous People's Day, and she discovers that Ryan is attending an upcoming school dance with another girl, Wesley struggles with feelings of inadequacy. These emotions amplify when she learns that she can never formally belong to the Upper Skagit Indian Tribe; because her verbally and physically abusive father, who left her mother before she was born, is white, Wesley's "blood quantum is too low to gain citizenship." Upper Skagit author Day (The Sea in Winter) presents Wesley's multilayered emotions, as well as myriad facets of Native life (including citizenship parameters), with crystal-clear prose. Via Wesley's self-aware and astoundingly perceptive first-person voice, Day highlights everyday tween conflicts about fitting in alongside experiential concerns surrounding identifying with one's heritage in this warmhearted approach to searching for—and finding—community and inclusion. Ages 8–12.