The Red Bird All-Indian Traveling Band by Frances Washburn—Books of Interest by Writers of Color

The engaging protagonist of Frances Washburn’s novel, The Red Bird All-Indian Traveling Band, Sissy Roberts, a self-aware and sassy young Lakota waitress, lead guitarist, and singer for the eponymous band, is beautiful and smart. Sissy is also gifted (or cursed) to have people confide all their secrets to her, whether they want to or not and whether she wants to hear them or not. Sissy graduated from high school four years earlier and wants to find a way to leave the reservation to go to college and avoid the common fate of her pregnant and unmarried friend, Speedy, who lives with Sissy and her family.

Part tightly paced mystery, part humorous, affectionate community chronicle, Washburn’s third novel takes place on the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations in South Dakota and begins on Fourth of July 1969 when a hail of beer bottles chases Sissy and the guys in the band out of the Longhorn Bar in Scenic where they are scheduled to play. That same night, Buffalo Ames is murdered outside the Longhorn, drawing Tom Holm, an FBI agent, toward Sissy with her talent for hearing secrets as his unwilling entrée into the close-knit and suspicious reservation community.  The book ends four months later after much romantic and other intrigue and after many of Sissy’s friends and loved ones have become suspects in the murder at one time or another before she solves the crime.

Rich in particulars of reservation life and unforgettable characters, Washburn creates a believable, well-drawn world in which she sets her emotionally complex story of the coming of age of a young woman with the gift of being a receptive listener who pays real attention to what people tell her and the truths behind what they say and the story of a downtrodden, complicated community in a pivotal time, forming and reforming itself. Washburn’s pared-down style is ironic and taut and, even when venturing into tragedy or love, never touches on sentimentality. This richly textured novel of a strong young woman’s and her community’s development and self-determination is a fine literary work with interlocked stories and telling details that bring Sissy and her world to life on the page.

As always, I suggest that you buy the book from the university publisher and support the publishers who bring you diversity in literature. Without university and small press publishers, we would have only the few most famous writers of color, and even they were usually initially published by the university and small press community.

http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/Books/bid2476.htm

Bio

Frances Washburn was born on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and grew up there. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico and was a visiting professor at the University of Nebraska before being hired at the University of Arizona where she is an Associate Professor in the American Indian Studies Program and the Department of English. She is the mother of two children, Lee and Stella.
Washburn is the author of the novels, Elsie's Business and The Sacred White Turkey, in addition to The Red Bird All-Indian Traveling Band. She has also published a biography of Louise Erdrich, Tracks on a Page: Louise Erdrich, Her Life and Works, as well as scholarly and academic articles and essays.

Sara Sue Hoklotubbe’s Sinking Suspicions—Books of Interest by Writers of Color

This is the first post in a month of #diverselit and #WeNeedDiverseBooks posts I am making. It seems a natural for me since I’ve long written a series of posts called Books of Interest by Writers of Color.

I’m a Cherokee poet and novelist who writes about a Cherokee protagonist, so people send me just about every novel written that has a major Indigenous character in it. A terrifying number of them are romances with generic spray-tanned hunks on the cover and love interests who are half-Cherokee, half-Navajo, half-Sioux, or just plain half-Indian (these authors don’t seem to know any other tribes exist) and written without the least tiny bit of knowledge of any of these different cultures. Recently, I received a non-romance novel written by a non-Native author with a Cherokee female protagonist. The blurbs made me hopeful, but once I started reading, it became apparent that the writer had done a little haphazard research online about the Cherokee to give “flavor” to her work. She got many of the most basic things wrong, but oddly enough had a few unusual things right. I don’t suppose I have to state that I won’t be reading any more of her books.

Then, along comes Sara Sue Hoklotubbe’s third Sadie Walela mystery, Sinking Suspicions, and my world is bright again. I could well talk about Hoklotubbe in my series on Literary Mystery Novelists and will tag this post that way, as well, because she writes so well and creates characters that live on the page. But her biggest strength is in her creation of Sadie’s background setting. Hoklotubbe brings to life the world of the Western Cherokee in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and its surrounding counties. Her protagonist, Sadie Walela, has been a rancher, a banker, a restaurant owner, and in Sinking Suspicions, is embarking on a career as a travel agent. Since Hoklotubbe is Cherokee and grew up in the same area as Sadie, she knows the land, the people, and the culture.

In Sinking Suspicions, Hoklotubbe writes about the modern Cherokee, the food, the dances, the small towns, the farms and ranches, the way people look out for one another and take care of each other, the respect for the elders and for family, the sense of humor, the sense of individualism within a sense of strong community of the Cherokee today. She even takes the timeworn trope of the person who claims to have a Cherokee princess for a grandmother and transforms it into something true and powerful.

This is the difference between an author who wants to use a people and their culture to add an exciting, singular touch to his book and writes mostly stereotypes and caricatures for his ethnic characters and an author who really knows what she’s writing about, whether from having lived it or from real research, which means getting to know the people as people and to know the culture through their eyes as a way of living and not an exotic artifact or simply searching on the internet among the stereotypes and (often) falsehoods that even (or perhaps especially) anthropologists have perpetuated.

In Sinking Suspicions, Sadie Walela heads to Hawaii to finalize her next career as a travel agent, leaving her lawman boyfriend, Lance Smith, alone and dissatisfied with her decision. The identity theft that affects Sadie’s aging Cherokee next-door neighbor, Buck Skinner, a World War II veteran and former horsebreaker, threatens his ownership of his family land and eventually leads to murder, conspiracy, and a rocky romance for Sadie. On the island, while worrying about Buck and Lance, Sadie becomes friends with a native Hawaiian family and learns enough about their culture and history to see real parallels with her own people. As tension mounts and Buck becomes a suspect in a murder case, an earthquake in Hawaii that disrupts communications and keeps Sadie from immediately returning to help Buck complicates the situation, leaving Sadie’s dear, old friend in grave danger, as well as threatening her new love. 

Sinking Suspicions is a must-read for those who like to read about other cultures, for mystery fans, and for fans of good fiction in general.

Bio

Sara Sue Hoklotubbe is a Cherokee tribal citizen and the author of the award-winning Sadie Walela Mystery Series. She grew up on the banks of Lake Eucha in northeastern Oklahoma and uses that location as the setting for her mystery novels to transport readers into modern-day Cherokee life.

THE AMERICAN CAFÉ was awarded the 2012 WILLA Literary Award for Original Softcover Fiction by Women Writing the West, won the 2012 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for Best Mystery, and was named 2012 Mystery of the Year by Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. The book was also named a finalist for the 2012 Oklahoma Book Awards and the 2011 ForeWord Book of the Year.  DECEPTION ON ALL ACCOUNTS won Sara the 2004 Writer of the Year Award from Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers.

Sara is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, Oklahoma Writers’ Federation, Inc., and Tulsa Night Writers. She and her husband live in Colorado.

Sinking Suspicions is available for pre-order now. http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/Books/bid2500.htm As usual, I suggest my readers buy from the university press that published this book, even though the book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The vast majority of writers of color are published only through small literary presses and university presses. Without them, we would only have a tiny handful of big-name writers of color available to us. Support them if you value #diverselit.

 
REPLIES TO COMMENTS (because Blogger hates me):

I'm glad you're going to try Hoklotubbe, Anonymous. She's an excellent writer, and her books are very enjoyable.

Thanks, Sara Sue. I'm going to paste that offer up here also. For anyone who wants to pre-order Sinking Suspicions from the University of Arizona Press, they may use the promotional code FLR and get 20% off.

Reine, I think you'll really enjoy this book and her others. Very authentic. Hoklotubbe does one of the best jobs I've seen of depicting Cherokee humor or, in fact, Native humor in general, which is dry and not always perceived as such by non-Natives.

Anne, so lovely to hear from you. I'm glad you'll have Sara Sue at the Tony Hillerman Conference. She's such a fine writer and really grand person, and of course, that conference is excellent. I've been so pleased at the reception of Spider Woman's Daughter.

Review—THROUGH THE EVIL DAYS by Julia Spencer-Fleming

As I promised on Tuesday’s blog about award-winning mystery novelist, Julia Spencer-Fleming, http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com/2013/10/literary-mystery-novelistsjulia-spencer.html, today I’m reviewing Spencer-Fleming’s newest novel, Through the Evil Days (St. Martin’s Press/Minotaur Books).  And I must confess, I approached this with trepidation. Spencer-Fleming is one of my favorite writers, and her last book, One Was a Soldier, was an absolute tour de force.  If you haven’t read it, run, don’t walk, to your nearest bookstore or online marketplace or library and grab it. This was Spencer-Fleming’s most ambitious book in a series of ambitious novels, and it was superbly executed. I frequently recommend it to others as the best book, fiction or nonfiction, that I’ve seen on the situation of the soldiers who are sent back again and again to Iraq and Afghanistan, the damage with which they return, the harm the corrupt private corporations involved in these wars do to those soldiers, and the way in which we as a country let them down when they return home with physical, mental, and emotional wounds.

Consequently, I was as nervous about reading Through the Evil Days as I was eager for it. Would it be a letdown after the great achievement of One Was a Soldier? How could she continue after a triumph like that? Probably these same questions gnawed at Spencer-Fleming and contributed to the longer-than-usual gap between these two books. I needn’t have worried, however. Spencer-Fleming really is one of the finest writers practicing today, and it shows in her newest novel.

Through the Evil Days opens with explosive arson, a double murder, the abduction of a little girl, and a dog that has failed in his attempts to guard his home and people. That’s a lot to happen in less than two pages, and it slams the reader right into the book. From there, we move to the protagonists, Rev. Clare Fergusson and Chief Russ Van Alstine, who are dealing with Clare’s PTSD and the alcohol and drug abuse it caused, as well as her unexpected pregnancy, stressing their brand-new marriage as much as her battle-induced problems since Russ adamantly has no desire for a child. Even as they travel to the crime scene in their professional capacities, others are plotting threats to their positions as Episcopalian priest and chief of the Millers Kill police force. There is plenty of suspense to keep the reader turning the page to find out what will happen to the child and to these two likable but flawed characters.

This book offers more than suspense, however, even though the suspense is taut and the plotting is complex with unforeseen twists throughout the book. Spencer-Fleming examines the massive illegal drug trade in the United States today and the corruption that its huge amounts of money brings into our society, the problems that women still face in the workforce, the struggles facing towns and cities in this time of austerity as they try to keep providing necessary services, and the difficulties of actually helping children in the custody of parents who are negligent or abusive. She faces these issues unflinchingly and shines a dispassionate light on all of them through her characters and their actions and responses.

Spencer-Fleming has given us another book with characters who come alive on the page, nonstop suspense, and surprising plot complications, all presented in lucid, intelligent prose. Through the Evil Days is another winner and will undoubtedly be nominated for the mystery genre’s top awards.

Through the Evil Days is available for pre-order now, and Spencer-Fleming is holding a contest in which everyone who pre-orders the book will receive an autographed original manuscript page and be entered in a drawing for a 16GB KINDLE Fire HDX. See her website, http://www.juliaspencerfleming.com/, for details.