November is Native Heritage month, and I LOVED some of the reads I did for it!
Two Roads, by Joseph Bruchac, is set during the Great Depression. A young boy's father enrolls him in the Challagi Indian School while he goes to Washington, D.C. to demand his soldier's bonus pay. I also feature Undefeated, a biography by Steve Sheinkin of one of the Carlisle School's best-known football players, Jim Thorpe.
I feature two books by Cynthia Leitich Smith, Indian Shoes, which is a series of gentle short stories for lower middle grade readers, with an excellent teaching guide, and Sisters of the Neversea, which features a not very likeable Peter Pan.
Land of the Cranes, by Aida Salazar, is a verse novel exposing living conditions of children detained at the US-Mexico border, and The Sea in Winter, by Christine Day, features a young girl pushing herself too hard to recover from a potentially career-ending (ballet) injury.
I loved Apple in the Middle, by Dawn Quigley, about a teen discovering her Native heritage and how she fits into a family she's never met before.
Which brings me to my favorite two, Healer of the Water Monster, by Brian Young, which reduced me to tears, and Elatsoe, by Darci Little Badger, which I thought was a brilliant fantasy and I voted for it earlier this year in the Dragon Awards!
Enjoy!
