The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

Title:  The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Author: Sherman Alexie  Illustrator: Ellen Forney

APA Bibliographic Information: Alexie, S., & Forney, E. (2008). The absolutely true diary of a part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie. Tumwater, WA: Washington State Library.
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
Lexile: 600L

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Summary:

This book is about Arnold, a Native American teen who lives on a reservation.  He lives with a family that struggles with many problems and loses many people he loves throughout the books. He is also very different than those who make part of his community because unlike most people there Arnold has dream and goals.  He wants to go to college and make something of himself and very few Indians that he knows about have done this. The only way he will have a chance is to move to an all-white school that is over 20 miles away from his house in the reservation.   When this happens, most of his family sees him as a traitor and bully him even more than they did before.  He gets bullied walking down the street, at school and even at his basketball games.  At his new school, he isn't well received at first but as time goes by they accept him.  He has an inner battle that consists of him feeling guilty for going against the norms by leaving his reservation and trying succeeded as an individual.  He hopes that maybe this will inspire others to not give up hope and realize that there more to life than what's just on the reservation. 

Who Would Enjoy this book? (Targeted Audience) :

Young adults would be the targeted audience for this book.  I would probably not recommend it for younger students who would not have the maturity to handle some of the explicit language used in the text. This would be a good book for teens who are having trouble finding an identity or are scared of following their dreams because of other people opinions. This again would be a good book for students to learn about bullying because this book touches on this specific subject on various occasions. A student who likes sports would also really like this book. 

Evaluation Of Text:

The author does a job creating a setting and characters that we can visualize. I also really enjoyed how we get a couple of sketches throughout the book, this is something rare in a young adult novel. It has a lot of twists and turns that the reader does not expect to happen. The tone of the story changes throughout the story.  There are times when the tone is humorous and other times when the tone saddens. The text also provides some challenging words that could be used for a vocabulary exercise.

Reader Response Activity: 

There are many activities that could be done with this book.  First of all, you could focus on the bullying that occurs and have a discussion about that.  The book also focuses on a couple of different tribes and I know that in school we don't get much education in this area. Not many books talk about Native American and their struggles, this is why I think this would be a good opportunity to shine some attention to those issues.  For the first activity, you could have your class pick a Native American tribe, do a little research and have them share it with the class.  Another idea would be to have them research the current struggles that Native Americans are struggling in this country and make a presentation.