The White, by Deborah Larsen

Like me, you may have heard the stories about the Indian boarding schools that were set up by the federal government in the 19th and 20th Centuries.  The basis for the schools was to take Indian children away from their families and communities and send them to boarding schools, mostly run by religious organizations, for the purpose of "civilizing" them, helping them "find religion", and otherwise causing them to be assimilated into white, Christian culture.  I find this whole episode one of the most shameful things in our history.  Sadly, it was so successful that the Australians did the same thing to aboriginal children in Australia. (As an aside, if you're interested in this topic there is a great movie called Rabbit-Proof Fence that explores the system in Australia).

What I have not heard as much about was the fact that in the early days of America the Indians engaged in similar practices with white children.  Not sending them away to Indian schools en masse, per se, but kidnapping them as retribution for fallen family members.  The White, by Deborah Larsen, is the fictionalized version of the true story of one such child.  During the French and Indian War, Mary Jemison's father moved his family away from the safety of the fortified towns and into the wilderness in Pennsylvania.  An Irishman by birth, prohibited from owning land in his country of origin, Jemison wanted to provide his family with opportunities they would never have had otherwise.  Unfortunately, his zeal for owning his own land came with a steep price.  One day in 1755 a group of Shawnee Indians raided their homestead, killing him, his wife, and most of their children.  The exception was Mary, who at 12 years old was captured by the Indians (and their French brothers in arms).  She was taken away from her family's lands and given to two sisters, members of the Seneca tribe, as restitution for the loss of their brother in battle.  The book chronicles her life from that day until her death in 1833.  During her long life, Mary lived, loved, and worked within the culture of the Seneca Nation.

Larsen does an excellent job of creating a picture of the Seneca culture of that time.  Her writing style is spare, but lyrical.  Alternating between a third person narrator and Mary's own words and thoughts, she provides the reader with an understanding of how Mary, known as Deh-he-wä-mis to the Seneca, came to be a person who walked between two worlds.  Mary married twice, once to a Delaware man and once to another Seneca, and had six children.  She truly was both Seneca and white, traveling between the two worlds with grace.  Throughout it all, she kept her father's dream of owning land alive, finally being granted 10,000 acres along the Genesee River in New York by the government.  While Larsen's writing style may be spare, she did not hold back when it came to describing the good and bad of both the Indians and the whites.  This is no overly sentimental account of the "noble savages"-I came away from this well-researched book feeling as though I had been given a glimpse into the reality that existed as our newly founded country sought to grow.  The truth of it seemed to be that the whites and Indians were able to find ways to coexist peacefully when allowed to do so.  It makes me wonder what would have happened over time if instead of running the Indians off the land we had found a way to work and live with them.

Second Glance, Or How to Fit Ghosts, Eugenics, Suicide, and Native American Civil Rights into One Book

Now, I'm all for complex story lines in books. When I'm in the mood for mental gymnastics, I pick up some epic fantasy novel or intricate period piece. I don't usually expect to work quite that hard on a book of popular fiction a la Oprah's book club. So imagine my surprise when I picked up a new-to-me Jodi Picoult book, Second Glance, and discovered a story that stretched both my suspension of disbelief and my ability to keep the facts straight almost to the breaking point.

Now, mind you, I like Jodi Picoult. I find her writing style engaging, and her characters fairly well-developed considering the kind of fiction that she writes. It's hard to have really nuanced characters when most of them are meant to stand in as archetypes for some segment or other of our society. I also appreciate that her books are usually about something, in that they examine various real-life issues in our society. You have the "should we allow people to have babies just to save their other children?" book, and the "what makes kids shoot up a school?" book. And who can forget the "atheist is converted by little girl who performs miracle" book? (OK, so I'm not quite as jazzed about that one, being an atheist myself and all, but you get my point.)

According to the book jacket, this book is about the power of family and love. Well, I suppose I can see that. The story revolves around a cast of characters in a small town in Vermont, who for one reason or another are drawn to try and solve a 70 year old murder. There is the suicidal Ross, who also happens to be a ghost-hunter, looking for the fiancee he lost in a tragic accident. There is his sister, Shelby, mother to a young boy with a rare genetic disease that will cause his early death. We meet Az Thompson, a 100 year old Native American with a secret past, and Meredith, a genetic researcher who helps couples eliminate genetic abnormalities from their unborn children. The real star of the show is Lia, who...well, if you decide to you'll just have to read about Lia yourself. All of these characters find themselves drawn together through familial or romantic love, and set the stage for one of the central questions of the book-if you love someone enough, will you follow them even into death?

I say one of the central questions, because this book poses many. What is the nature of faith? Can love outlast life? What are the moral and ethical ramifications of genetic manipulation? What does it mean to be haunted? Is suicide ever justified? Is there one soulmate for each of us? What does it mean to be "family? And not only do we examine these questions through some fairly splintered narrative, we also get treated to a history lesson on the eugenics movement in America in the 1920s and 1930s. While I was horrified by the things I learned, I didn't feel like I could give the topic the attention it deserved because too many of my brain cells were occupied trying to keep track of who was who, when they lived, how they were related to everyone else, and whether I could buy the whole ghost thing.

Despite all of this, I was invested enough in the story to see it through to the end, but whether that is because I was truly engaged or just stubborn is up for debate. I'm going to call this one a "read it if someone gives it to you for free and you don't have anything else to read" book.