Stealing
A Novel
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4.2 • 38 Ratings
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
“This powerful novel should join classics like Ernest J. Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Helena Maria Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus, and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.”—New York Times Book Review
A gripping, gut-punch of a novel about a Cherokee child removed from her family and sent to a Christian boarding school in the 1950s—an ambitious, eye-opening reckoning of history and small-town prejudices from Pulitzer Prize finalist Margaret Verble.
Kit Crockett lives on a farm with her grief-stricken, widowed father, tending the garden, fishing in a local stream, and reading Nancy Drew mysteries from the library bookmobile. One day, Kit discovers a mysterious and beautiful woman has moved in just down the road.
Kit and the newcomer, Bella, become friends, and the lonely Kit draws comfort from her. But when a malicious neighbor finds out, Kit suddenly finds herself at the center of a tragic, fatal crime and becomes a ward of the court. Her Cherokee family wants to raise her, but the righteous Christians in town instead send her to a religious boarding school. Kit’s heritage is attacked, and she’s subjected to religious indoctrination and other forms of abuse. But Kit secretly keeps a journal recounting what she remembers—and revealing just what she has forgotten. Over the course of Stealing, she unravels the truth of how she ended up at the school and plots a way out. If only she can make her plan work in time.
In swift, sharp, and stunning prose, Margaret Verble spins a powerful coming-of-age tale and reaffirms her place as an indelible storyteller and chronicler of history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Verble, a Pulitzer finalist for Maud's Line, draws on the abuses at Native American and First Nations boarding schools for her blistering latest, set in the 1950s somewhere along the Arkansas River. Nine-year-old Kit Crockett has been lonely since the death of her Cherokee mother; her white father cares for her as best he can. When glamorous Bella moves into a nearby cabin that used to be Kit's uncle's, Kit revels in the woman's maternal affection, but the locals aren't very welcoming toward the outsider, who descends from a "stew" of Native and white ancestors. In the aftermath of a tragedy, the details of which are made clear near the end, local clerical and legal authorities compel Kit to attend a nearby boarding school, where she and other Native girls are subjected to prejudice and abuse. Kit's only solace is her journal, in which she traces her friendship with Bella and chronicles the school's mistreatment of students. Kit's realistically naive perspective and her appealingly digressive narration build suspense and intrigue as readers slowly grasp the scale of the losses that will shape her life. Evoking the title, the varied meanings of "steal" (both to abscond and to creep) weave throughout the story in clever ways. Verble's skillful storytelling does justice to a harrowing chapter of history.
