From the Hilltop
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Drawing on American Indian oral traditions and her own Métis upbringing, Jensen tells stories that mix many lives and voices to offer fleeting perspectives on a world that reconfigures the tragedy and disconnection often found in narratives of American Indian life. A brother falls off the roof of an abandoned hotel, a young bride tries to connect with a family she’s never met, and an adopted teenage girl seeks acceptance where she is viewed as an outsider. The reader also encounters a kidnapped nephew, strangers in a hotel, and even a stray dog: these are the souls that populate Jensen’s stories, finding tentative connections with the past, the future, one another, and finally us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The rich array of characters in Jensen s sobering collection are often Native Americans with one foot in an unforgiving white world and the other in the vanishing Native culture. The young protagonist of Butter, admiring the butter sculptures at the Minnesota State Fair, is a Blackfoot girl from the Blood Reserve in Alberta later adopted by a white couple. When a melee breaks out, she finds comforting words for the distressed Dairy Queen that obliterate the ideas each of them has about the other. At the Powwow Hotel is an extraordinary, mystical tale: corn has begun reappearing in ancestral cornfields, attracting a migration of Indians and allowing a recent widower and his son to find new purpose in running their West Texas hotel. The title story, chronicling an accident involving a group of drinking kids that leaves one with a life-threatening injury, offers, via a clever use of repetition, a regretful litany of complaints endured as the cost of assimilation into white culture. These stories are as much about tradition as they are about the now; Jensen s understated and powerful prose easily bridges that divide.
