Girl with Skirt of Stars

First Line: With low tongue and open mouth, the man began soft as a jazzman to pull off the seduction.

Lilli Chischilly became a lawyer in order to protect her people-- the Navajo-- even to testifying before Congress about Colorado River water usage. Happily married, she is disconcerted when her childhood friend, Jerome Bah, moves back to the reservation and makes contact with her, but she's thrown even further off balance when the president of the Navajo Nation insists she joins Senator Lee and his family on a rafting trip through the Grand Canyon.

The Mormon presidential candidate whom many believe will be the next President of the United States has a reason why he wants Lilli along on the trip. One of his campaign promises is to use show more new technology to wring every last bit of water and power from Mother Nature. He also wants a legal guarantee to be granted to California for the water rights to the Colorado River. (Which means that-- no matter what happens-- California would get its water regardless of anyone else who needs it.)

Thinking Lilli will be a captive audience, Lee intends to make sure she agrees to this legal guarantee. What neither of them know is that Lee has an enemy who's determined to kill him somewhere along the river down in the depths of the Grand Canyon. Furthermore, the enemy's chances of success are excellent since there are only eleven people traveling on the raft.

Kitchell has a very lyrical writing style that has unexpected touches of humor, as when someone claims another character is "so narrow minded he could applaud with his ears."

The raft trip through the Grand Canyon is extremely suspenseful, since the reader knows there's a killer waiting for them somewhere along the route. A secondary plot line that involves Lilli's childhood friend, Jerome Bah, adds tension between Lilli and Jerome as well as serving as a natural springboard for sharing many Navajo customs and stories.

We could learn much from the Navajo. Tony Hillerman knew this, and Jennifer Kitchell, in her beautifully told story, is following in his footsteps.

Life is brief, she thought, tenuous, but it has a point. We are here to create life, and to teach it, and to die old in beauty. "Beauty" did not mean you walked to old age with no illness, or you walked to old age with cosmetically enhanced qualities of the young. It was not about physical attributes. It was about a quality of character.

May all of you walk in beauty. show less

I loved this book. Lilli Chischilly is fascinating, a well educated lawyer with a strong belief in her Navajo traditions. Rarely does a novel get me reading up on things the author touches, but I found myslef googling the Navajo religious traditions trying to get a better understanding. I reread the book after a couple of weeks of digesting all the overlapping story lines. Lilli's decidedly odd marriage, her relationship with her childhood friend Jerome Bah, and the mystery of what he photographed, then there's the presidental candidate and his strange family relationships. I thoroughly enjoyed the story, would love to hear more about Jerome and Lilli in future stories.

Lilli Chischilly is a Navajo lawyer who has found a pair of mutilated coyote carcasses carefully laid out on the hood of her vehicle. This is clearly a message, but the meaning of the message is a mystery. In the meantime, Jerome, Lilli's childhood soul mate, has returned to the Navajo Nation and alludes to a dark and burdensome secret that he wants Lilli to discover. Lilli has this on her mind when her boss asks her to escort presidential candidate Lee, his family and handlers on a river raft trip down the Grand Canyon. Lillie rightly guesses that this is a publicity stunt and has everything to do with the politics of water and land use that is ever present in the Western United States. If all of this isn't enough, a sniper with a show more grudge over a century old massacre is stalking the presidential candidate and his family with massacre plans of his own.

The plot of Girl with Skirt of Stars is fast paced and kept me reading into the wee hours of the morning. I did find the narrative a bit choppy and the characters lacking in depth, though, and this kept me from attaching to and caring very deeply about them. This type of book seems to call for better character development than Kitchell provided. There were also elements of the story that seemed quite important yet were never developed and just got dropped at the end. This is Kitchell's debut novel, so I'm hoping that these shortfalls are something that will improve in future.

As a native of the Southwest, I thought the descriptions of the Four Corners area were beautiful and I was drawn into the setting. The inclusion of quite a few Navajo words (there is a glossary at the end of the book) and how those words "mean" within the Navajo culture was a fantastic look into a little known people group. Language nuance is an important part of Kitchell's story.

Overall, I was pleased with Girl with Skirt of Stars and would recommend it to those interested in a fast paced novel set in the Southwest.

I would like to thank the publisher, Pronghorn Press, for providing me with a review copy of Girl with Skirt of Stars. show less

Right off the bat this book contained features that I really like and which usually indicate to me that I will like the book, such as the drawings at the start of each chapter and the Appendix of Navajo Terms and Concepts. I like to feel that I am learning a bit even when I'm reading for pleasure. The only thing missing for me were a few maps of the area. I love books with maps whether they are of real or imagined places. It sets a tone and orients me to the story and what the storyteller is seeing as she writes about the characters within the setting.

Kitchell's writing is lovely and kept me turning the pages. She gracefully explores the themes of reality v. perceptions; and of words and of images - their meanings, what they say (and show more what they hide) and how they can be influenced by culture, language, time, place, and who gets to "write" the history. I really enjoyed the story, but I wanted more. I wanted to know more about Lilli, Jerome and the conspicuously missing husband, Jake.

I loved the raft trip down the Colorado. Her descriptions of the river, the light and dark, the stars, land, cliffs, birds and wildlife left me longing to be there. However, I again wished for a little more character development of the travelers. Kitchell definitely gave us a feel for the characters but in very broad strokes. At the same time, I thought the whole assassin's story was extraneous. Its only purpose seemed to be to tell the story of the Mountain Meadows Massacre and John D. Lee of Lees Ferry fame. I think that story added a lot to her themes but could have been told just as well by Lilli herself.

Despite these little quibbles, I really loved the book and would recommend it. I am hoping that my questions and desire to know these characters better will be answered in the next Lilli book. show less

I for the most part really liked this book. The plot is a little hard to explain. It's about a Navajo woman who travels down the Colorado River with a presidential candidate who wants to put another dam in the Grand Canyon, thus destroying caves and other areas that are sacred to to the Navajo. There is also a side plot with a man who plans to shoot the candidate and his entire party when they reach a certain part of the river, and the murder of another man that may or may not have been committed by a childhood friend. This is the plot on the face of it, but more than this it's about Navajo traditions and values and how they give meaning to the people of the Navajo nation, and also about the relationships that develop between the people show more on the raft as it floats down the river. It's an unusual plot with mostly interesting characters. My only criticism is that the Whites in the book are mostly portrayed as naive, boorish and ignorant idiots, while the Navajos are all honorable, dignified, and spiritually superior. I got a little tired of the patronizing of Western culture/society as though it and its people are spiritually and culturally inferior to Native Americans. The author in several places makes statements about how Westerners just couldn't possibly understand the duality of the divine, how sex is about creation, etc. As though these things have never been thought of by anyone except Native Americans. Give me a break already.

Aside from this one issue, this book was engaging, interesting, creative and unique. I do recommend it, but just be prepared to be a bit frustrated at times. show less

I really enjoyed this author's first mystery - set in Navajo country, with a female Navajo lawyer protagonist. The story flows well, though it is improbable, it is engaging. Descriptions of places I've been and similar experiences I've had ring true- Kitchell is an accurate observer and can convey a sense of place. I can''t speak to the accuracy of her characterization of Navajo traditions and spirituality, but readers of Tony Hillerman will feel at home with it. Her characters are believable, and (mostly) likable. I hope she writes more - with a bit more experience and a good editor, the plot construction will smooth out- (there were a few details that seemed ot get too much attention for their ultimate importance, and a couple of show more things were left unresolved). A very good first book - show less

I wouldn't call this the most original of stories - Tony Hillerman spent years describing the lives of the Navajos and their issues with non-Navajo people and government. What, then, does Kitchell's debut novel bring to the table? Well, for starters, it's not really a mystery although there are mystery-events in the story. Mainly, it's a political novel that tries to highlight the history of the Southwest and what ills have been done its indigenous peoples.

Kitchell's strength is that she presents such a truthful view into the mind of the Navajo - her descriptions of their beliefs are absolutely spot-on. Another strength is her breath-taking descriptions of the landscape - she really manages to bring the reader along on the Grand show more Canyon-journey while illustrating its importance to the native peoples living around it.

The political story-line is, however, not as enticing. The president-to-be is a stereotypical "slimy" politician who doesn't even care about his own family, and the assassin character is a stereotypical psychopath, complete with overbearing mother and all. One-dimensional "bad guy" characters are inherently uninteresting, so, although the Mountain Meadows history is worth reading about, those parts just didn't pique my interest very much.

All in all, it's a very good debut novel that showcases Kitchell's knowledge and sensitive understanding of the Navajo people. Had she concentrated only on that part, we may have gotten a deeper understanding of our characters - there are many questions left unanswered - which I would have preferred. It's still a great achievement and I will definitely want to read more of Kitchell's fiction. show less