Fiction, World Literature, Fiction Subjects, Peoples & Cultures - Fiction

Roofwalker

Name: Roofwalker
Author: Susan Power
ISBN: 9781571310415

by Susan Power

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Overview

Susan Power, the best-selling author of The Grass Dancer, returns with Roofwalker, a book of fiction and nonfiction in which spirits and the living commingle and Native American culture and modern life collide with disarming power, humor, and joy.

Synopsis

In Roofwalker, Native American writer Susan Power explores the complexities of contemporary Native American life. Featuring both fiction and nonfiction — "stories" and "histories" — the book shows the ways that native traditions and beliefs work for characters who live physically and spiritually far from the reservation. The first seven pieces are "stories," such as the title tale in which a young girl believes in the power of the "roofwalker" spirit to make her dreams come true; or "Beaded Souls," in which Maxine Bullhead, living in Chicago, is cursed by the sin of her great-grandfather, an Indian policeman sent to arrest Sitting Bull. The last five pieces are "histories" that repeat subjects and themes found in the earlier section, making Roofwalker a book in which spirits and the living commingle and Sioux culture and modern life collide with disarming power, humor, and joy.

Publishers Weekly

Power continues to explore her Native American heritage in this short story collection, a poignant, evocative follow-up to her PEN/Hemingway Award-winning first book, The Grass Dancer. Many of the stories have dual settings involving Sioux protagonists who have emigrated from North Dakota to Chicago, starting with the title story, which tells of a young girl's longings for her father after he abandons her mother and the girl's two siblings. Family ties are another connecting thread: "Watermelon Seeds" is a familiar story about a 16-year-old girl who tries to battle her mother's disapproval after her older boyfriend gets her pregnant; "Beaded Soles" is a taut, unusual tale in which a woman murders her husband after a difficult relocation to Chicago and a miscarriage. Power effectively uses vivid, colorful Native American imagery and myths in the longer stories, but several of the shorter entries are fragmented and shakier-"The Attic" is an ordinary account of some intriguing heirlooms that a woman finds among her family's artifacts, while "Chicago Waters" is a better, more complex series of musings about the perils and potential of swimming in Lake Michigan. The author displays a greater sense of narrative command here than in her debut, which allows her to take risks with her conceits and story lines. Occasionally she veers toward clich s of Native American fiction, but her confident voice marks her as a writer with potential. Author tour. (Sept.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly

Library Journal

Power's first book, The Grass Dancer, featured tales of life on the reservation and won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Roofwalker, this year's winner of the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, focuses mainly on the lives of Native Americans and mixed bloods living away from the reservation, mostly in Power's native Chicago. Part fiction, part autobiography, these stories show what it's like to live between two worlds. In the title story, a nine-year-old girl struggles as her father, a "gung-ho Indian," leaves his job at the Indian Center in Chicago to return to his native South Dakota, taking with him not his family but a young girlfriend. "First Fruits" tells the story of a young woman's initial days at Harvard, beginning with the orientation tour, where her father surprises everyone with his knowledge of the first Native students, thereby giving his daughter a support group of ancestors. In "The Attic," when 11-year-old Susan and her Dakota mother clean out the attic at the home of Susan's paternal grandmother, who had just moved to a nursing home, they find documents from ancestors who signed the Declaration of Independence and fought in the American Revolution. This collection of moving, well-written tales is recommended for literary fiction collections. Debbie Bogenschutz, Cincinnati State Technical & Community Coll. Lib., OH Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Twelve pieces, a combination of fiction and nonfiction, describe life among Native Americans who have left the reservations and entered mainstream society. Power (the novel Grass Dancer, 1994), a Sioux who grew up in Chicago and studied at Harvard, writes pretty closely of her own experience, to such an extent that her pieces seem as much a set of variations on a theme as a collection of separate tales. The narrators are mostly young women of Sioux/Dakota origin living in urban centers far removed (both spiritually and geographically) from the reservations and tribal homelands of their ancestors. The title story, for example, describes the unhappy domestic life of a Sioux family in Chicago: Told by a girl, it portrays the quiet trauma when an Indian-rights organizer leaves his wife and family and returns to the reservation-ostensibly to do political work, but in reality to seek a new life with his girlfriend. Some stories examine the tensions of mixed marriages. "Watermelon Seeds" is an account of a Mexican-American girl from Chicago who becomes pregnant by a Chippewa from Wisconsin, while "The Attic" sorts through the family histories of a half-Sioux, half-Irish-American girl who finds some resonance in the history of persecution among her ancestors on both sides of her family. "Angry Fish" is an excursion into magic-realism, introducing us to Mitchell Black Deer, a Sioux in Chicago who becomes friendly with a talking statue of St. Jude. Other pieces concern the relation between past and present: The narrator of "First Fruits" (a Harvard freshman, a Sioux) becomes so intrigued by the story of the first Indian to graduate from the college (in 1655) that she begins to see him on campus,while the young narrator of "Museum Indians" visits the Natural History Museum in Chicago to see the Indian dress donated by her Dakota grandmother. An interesting perspective on an unfamiliar world. Tales that are well crafted but ultimately rather repetitive.