Little - Softcover

David Treuer grew up on an Ojibwe reservation in Northern Minnesota. A graduate of Princeton University, he lives in Bemidji, Minnesota

An empty coffin is lowered into a grave behind a half-abandoned housing project called Poverty on an Indian reservation in northern Minnesota. The burial ceremony is for an enigmatic eight-year-old boy named Little, whose entire vocabulary consists of the word you. First novelist Treuer reconstructs Little's biography by allowing Poverty's inhabitants to tell their own life stories in a mosaic of first-person narratives. In the process, we learn the history of Poverty itself, from the turn of the century to the present. Land that was once virgin pine forest has been ruthlessly logged and tilled until it is now a barren, windswept waste, littered with the skeletons of rusting farm machinery. The town's population has been similarly devastated by poverty, alcoholism, and the Vietnam War. Treuer's portrait of a downtrodden people unfolds in slow, carefully measured prose, packed with descriptive detail. An ambitious first novel about America's rural poor; recommended for all larger fiction collections.?Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles
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