Janet Campbell Hale

How do you give a sensitive review of a book in which the author has bared her soul? Someone so hurt by abuse that she can only speak about her past by putting some distance, making it stories?
It is well-written, depicting a family of mixed heritage Native Americans: Coeur d'Alene/Kootenay/Chippewa/Irish/Scottish. whose family history is bound up with that of the early Hudson Bay factors. She was born in 1946, but recounts family history from years earlier, as it impacted her parents' show more ability to parent.
I honor Janet Campbell Hale for her honesty and her talent. show less

Apparently, I'm missing something in this short, simple novella about a young Native American boy who spends a winter with his half-sister in an oceanfront city in the Pacific Northwest.

After witnessing a friend's suicide and editing his version of the events to benefit the young man's family, Billy White Hawk is sent away for a while to avoid additional and inconvenient questions. He winds up in an unnamed city with a half-sister he barely knows, is bullied at school, mopes around aimlessly show more through the winter, then goes back home. He and his aging father have a few good weeks, and then the elder White Hawk dies.

Billy decides he will never have his Spirit Dream and that he doesn't need his secret, manhood name that is bestowed therein, but that he's going to be okay anyway.

I guess this could be considered YA, but I'm not sure what meaning a young reader would be likely to get from it, other than the notion that Black kids are mean to Indian kids just on general principals. show less

This book is about a young Native American who leaves the reservation to go to school in the city. He faces tremendous challenges in a world bent on his destruction.

I enjoyed this book very much. I was glad that the book ended the way it did rather than on a negative note or on an unrealistic "dream-come-true" note

From The Critics
Publishers Weekly
In these seven loosely linked autobiographical essays, novelist Hale ( The Jailing of Cecilia Capture ) reflects on her family, her personal struggles and her Native American heritage. After two slight pieces, she poignantly and bitterly recalls her childhood, ``my mother and myself on the run'' in Idaho, Washington and Oregon, fleeing Hale's drunken father. Her mother, whose own education was cut short, was ``an absolute master of verbal abuse,'' and Hale show more still grapples with the legacy of that troubled relationship. The author recalls her own difficulties with marriage and poverty, then describes how, seeking a college scholarship, she reconnected with her family's background on the Coeur d'Alene reservation. An essay on her white great-great-grandfather, John McLoughlin, and a visit to her father's grave also prompt musings on her Indian identity. But Hale's fragmentary style vitiates her message, and she does not discuss what might be the most interesting aspect of her life: her place in ``an intertribal urban Indian community.'' Author tour. (June)

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Library Journal
In this collection of bittersweet autobiographical essays, Hale reveals and examines her often conflicting experiences as the daughter of a Native American father and mixed-blood mother, a single parent, and a fiction writer. Disregarded by her siblings, who are ten to 14 years older than she, and mistreated by her mother, Hale provides a portrait of dysfunctionalism perpetuating itself. In her first nonfiction work (following her novel, The Jailing of Cecelia Capture , Univ. of New Mexico Pr., 1987), Hale attempts to identify and grasp the causes of her unease as she delves into her personal and genealogical history. A sense of the disconnectedness that plagues Hale in terms of her family pervades the text, as does a clash of causes and effects. Hale presents snippets of interesting Native American history throughout this work, which must have been both painful and therapeutic to write. Recommended for public and academic libraries.-- Jeris Cassel, Rutgers Univ. Libs., New Brunswick, N.J. show less