From the Hilltop

For the characters we meet in Toni Jensen’s stories, the past is very much the present. Theirs are American Indian lives off the reservation, lives lived beyond the usual boundaries set for American Indian characters: migratory, often overlooked, yet carrying tradition with them into a future of difference and possibility.

Drawing on American Indian oral traditions and her own Métis upbringing, Jensen tells stories that mix many lives and voices to offer fleeting perspectives on a world that reconfigures the tragedy and disconnection often found in narratives of American Indian life. A brother falls off the roof of an abandoned hotel, a young bride tries to connect with a family she’s never met, and an adopted teenage girl seeks acceptance where she is viewed as an outsider. The reader also encounters a kidnapped nephew, strangers in a hotel, and even a stray dog: these are the souls that populate Jensen’s stories, finding tentative connections with the past, the future, one another, and finally us.

Publishers Weekly

The rich array of characters in Jensen’s sobering collection are often Native Americans with one foot in an unforgiving white world and the other in the vanishing Native culture. The young protagonist of “Butter,” admiring the butter sculptures at the Minnesota State Fair, is a Blackfoot girl from the Blood Reserve in Alberta later adopted by a white couple. When a melee breaks out, she finds comforting words for the distressed Dairy Queen that obliterate the ideas each of them has about the other. “At the Powwow Hotel” is an extraordinary, mystical tale: corn has begun reappearing in ancestral cornfields, attracting a migration of Indians and allowing a recent widower and his son to find new purpose in running their West Texas hotel. The title story, chronicling an accident involving a group of drinking kids that leaves one with a life-threatening injury, offers, via a clever use of repetition, a regretful litany of complaints endured as the cost of assimilation into white culture. These stories are as much about tradition as they are about the now; Jensen’s understated and powerful prose easily bridges that divide. (Mar.)

Toni Jensen is an assistant professor of English at the University of Central Florida. Her short stories have appeared in numerous literary magazines and have been reprinted in volumes such as New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, 2007 and Best Stories from the Southwest.