I’d wanted to read this book since I watched the movie Smoke Signals when I was a teenager, but kept putting it off. And in some ways, that was a good thing. I don’t know if I would have appreciated these stories as much if I’d read when I was a teenager. There are a lot of similar themes running through them, for obvious reasons: relationships between fathers and sons, Indians and alcohol, modernity versus tradition. These similarities might have turned me off when I was younger, but now I see them as common threads instead of repetitiveness. Some of the stories left me flat, but a few of them (“Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock”, “Jesus Christ’s Half-Brother is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation”, the title story) were absolutely astonishing. I want to read more of Alexie’s work now and see how he’s developed as a writer, because these stories are a great first start.

This book is GREAT. Alexie is a genius. “The first time I heard Robert Johnson sing I knew he understood what it meant to be Indian on the edge of the twenty-first century, even if he was black at the beginning of the twentieth.” That’s what this book is like. The blues, full of beauty, poetry, sobriety, and injustice.