Sherman Alexie

Product Description: With Ten Little Indians, Alexie offers nine poignant and emotionally resonant new stories about Native Americans who, like all Americans, find themselves at personal and cultural crossroads, faced with heartrending, tragic, sometimes wondrous moments of being that test their loyalties, their capacities, and their notions of who they are and who they love.

Junior is a basketball-playing, cartoon-drawing teenager living on the Spokane Indian Reservation. When he decides that it's time to start working towards a better future for himself, he leaves his school on the reservation for an all-white high school where he finds that the only other Indian there is the school mascot. With a sense of humor and a strong spirit, Junior remains determined to persevere in the face of tragedy and a complicated exploration of his own identity. Cartoon drawings accompany the text.

Product Description: In this darkly comic collection, Alexie brilliantly weaves memory, fantasy, and stark realism to paint a complex, grimly ironic portrait of life in and around the Spokane Indian Reservation. These twenty-two interlinked tales are narrated by characters raised on humiliation and government-issue cheese, and yet are filled with passion and affection, myth and dream.

Thunder Boy Jr. is named after his dad, but he wants a name that's all his own. Just because people call his dad Big Thunder doesn't mean he wants to be Little Thunder. He wants a name that celebrates something cool he's done, like Touch the Clouds, Not Afraid of Ten Thousand Teeth, or Full of Wonder. But just when Thunder Boy Jr. thinks all hope is lost, he and his dad pick the perfect name...a name that is sure to light up the sky.