Michael A. Elliot
Hogan has done more in this novel than to illustrate the cultural conflict that occurs when disparate ways of comprehending the world collide. She has written a book about a crisis of belief that is dizzying in its depths, a book that is a testament to the ability of people to imagine what they cannot articulate. -- Boston Book Review
Publishers Weekly
- Publisher's Weekly
Sixteen-year-old Omishita Eaton and her adoptive Aunt Ama, the main characters of Chickasaw Indian Hogan's (Solar Storms) thought-provoking new bildungsroman, are members of the fictional Taiga tribe of Florida, a dwindling group down to its last 30 members. After a devastating hurricane, Ama and the girl track a wounded deer into the swamps, using it as a stalking horse to hunt a panther, an animal sacred to the Taiga. Ama kills the cat, a scrawny, flea-bitten example of its species, and is charged with poaching and violations of the Endangered Species Act. The event tears the Taiga community apart. Most castigate her for slaying the sacred animal, but Omishita stands by her. Though Ama's motives are never made entirely clear, there are intimations that she undertook the taboo act in the hope of sparking a regeneration not only of the Taiga culture but of all Creation itself. Hogan is known principally as a poet, and the current work reflects that vocation in her lyrical, almost mystical use of language. The novel is about two different ways of knowing the world and the problems that ensue when these ways come into conflict. Though slow at times, this is nonetheless a novel of gentle rewards. (May)
KLIATT
Omishto, or "one who watches," is one of 30 surviving Taiga people, a Florida swamp tribe decimated by the Spanish colonialists and subsequent decades of Westernization. Omishto's mother lives a suburban lifestyle with an abusive man, not Omishto's father, having forsaken the burden of upholding Taiga tradition for the promises of the Pentecostal church. Omishto is powerfully drawn to the world of her Aunt Ama, a Taiga woman who lives by old Taiga ways out in the woods and is led by the sacred and nearly extinct Florida panther and by her ability to see and breath in nature. It is Ama who leads Omishto into an ordeal that finally separates Omishto from contemporary civilization, unraveling as it is by "its own half-shaped, barely lived life," and into the Kili swamp, where the last of her beleaguered yet dignified and powerful tribal elders live. This story is written by a poet who brings a lush Florida swamp and an equally verdant spirit world palpably to life on the page. Omishto dreams she is "a green branch beginning to bloom, to grow something strong and human and alive," and for the reader this provides a hopeful affirmation of courage and of a life of deep consciousness and true, natural power and mystery. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 1998, Norton, 235p, 21cm, 97-42997, $13.00. Ages 16 to adult. Reviewer: Karen Stebbins; Freelance Writer, Concord, MA, July 2000 (Vol. 34 No. 4)
Kirkus Reviews
Before her time, a 16-year-old Native American girl is thrust into adult turmoil as the only witness to the shooting by her best friend of an endangered Florida panther, in Hogan's (Solar Storm, 1995, etc.) latest complex exploration of Native ways and the environment at risk. Omishto (a Taiga name meaning "One Who Watches") is one of the last of her tribe, and though only an adolescent sheþs already experienced many horrors: her older brother burning to death, her stepfather's physical abuse and lust, her mother's desperate, self-destructive effort to pass as white. When a hurricane comes along, flattening the land and trapping her outside, she sees deer flying and Methuselah, a tree dating from before the Spanish arrival, uprooted. After the storm, nothing seems the way it was before, so when her friend and protector Ama—like Omishto, a member of the Panther Clan—takes her on a trek through the devastation to find and shoot the panther Ama calls "Grandmother," the hunt seems as unreal as everything else. Reality hits home only when Ama is arrested and tried for the killing, and Omishto is called to testify. Ama is found not guilty, but she then has to face an even more harrowing trial: that of the tribal elders, who accuse her of trying to gain spiritual power by killing a sacred animal. Omishto, who must testify before the elders, finally begins to understand why her friend acted as she didþbut sheþs sworn by Ama not to say why. Because of that, Ama is banished from the tribe. Maintaining a difficult balance between her understanding and her sense of loss, Omishto moves into Ama's house, forsaking her own family, to decide what path her own lifeshould follow. While the narrative often seems an uneasy blend of the visionary and the message-driven, the result is nonetheless an evocative coming-of-age saga. And the portrait of natureþs elemental power is distinctive and haunting.
