AJ Dunn Reads

  The Yield By Tara June Winch 4 stars.

  Braiding Sweetgrass By Robin Wall Kimmerer 4 stars.

  There There By Tommy Orange Several urban Natives come together for a powwow in Oakland, California where a robbery occurs.  Throughout the narrative we follow many different Native characters who live in urban areas and we see how some of their lives intertwine as each gets their turn. Each one gives us an inside look into their experiences as urban Native Americans, each dealing with complex and difficult inner and outer struggles, as well as the history of pain and suffering ingrained in their DNA, a pain passed down. But also, the spirituality and beauty that history has embedded within it. Some feel their Native-ness in their everyday lives, while others have a hard time recognizing anything Native about themselves or the world they inhabit. Some yearn to have a deeper connection to that shared community, while others intend to exploit it. But all of them grapple with it and what it means to them in their own unique, powerful ways. They all come to learn that there is a...

  Empire of Wild By Cherie Dimaline Joan is a member of a tribe in Canada that is made up of what she calls half-breeds, a tribe that is constantly struggling against political factors that want to take their land for profit. One night, after a fight with her husband Victor over selling some of the land left to her by her dead father, Victor disappears. Joan's life falls apart afterward as she struggles to get through life without him, always looking out for him, and not knowing what happened to him. One day she stumbles across a religious revival tent in a Walmart parking lot, goes inside, and finds her husband as the Reverend of a church devoted to getting the half-breed population to adopt this Christian religion. But the whole thing is a cover created by the very shrewd businessman, Heiser. Is this Reverend Wolff her husband. He doesn't recognize her and insists he is not who she thinks he is. Along this story is the legend of the rogarou, a wolf/man hybrid that is said to ...

Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones This novella tells the story of Junior, an Indian boy living with his mother and younger brother, Dino. Junior is a sleepwalker who awakens one night to see his dead father walking across the room. He believes his father, in full dancing regalia, has come back to make them a whole family again. Dino suffers from seizures and Junior thinks his father is there to protect Dino, to make him well. But this thinking changes as Junior gets into a scrape with the neighbors dogs and the four canines end up dead, torn apart. Junior starts to think his father has another purpose in returning. Dino begins to have worse seizures and marks appear on his neck. Is Junior's father trying to take Dino's life essence to make himself whole again? Junior's mother begins dating the Sheriff's deputy, which doesn't sit well with Junior, who steals the pistol from the deputy's vehicle. With the gun in hand he finds a man bent over his brother...