Stark, poignant and relays the kind of truth only found in fiction. The characters are sympathetic and strong. The collection is inspirational, if only for revealing and coddling our weaknesses as mere human beings.
A compilation of Alexie's most disturbing sexual fantasies/fetishes/scenarios. Not what I expected.
In these stories, we meet the kinds of American Indians we rarely see in literature-the upper and middle class, the professionals and white-collar workers, the bureaucrats and poets, falling in and out of love and wondering if they will make their way home. A Spokane Indian journalist transplanted from the reservation to the city picks up a hitchhiker, a Lummi boxer looking to take on the toughest Indian in the world. A Spokane son waits for his diabetic father to return from the hospital, listening to his father's friends argue over Jesus' carpentry skills as they build a wheelchair ramp. An estranged interracial couple, seperated in the midst of a traffic accident, rediscover their love for each other. A white drifter holds up an International House of Pancakes, demanding a dollar per customer and someone to love, and emerges with forty-two dollars and an overweight Indian he dubs Salmon Boy.
