aimiller's Reviews (689)

This collection was challenging as HELL, but so worth it ultimately. It's one I definitely want to go back to--it was my first venture back into poetry in a long time, and it was really a challenge to parse. Bitsui's poems are so full of images that it is borderline overwhelming and can be hard to follow at times, but it definitely sweeps you along even as it also jars you out of your comfort zone. The last two poems especially are so beautiful and shattering and hopeful and I really loved them. I recommend reading this but giving it a lot of time to sit with.

Okay so I first want to say I received a copy of this book through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to get books and review them.

That being said: 1) I'm not sure why I requested this when I find the entire genre of western to be frankly irredeemable, at least when written by white folks, and 2) I had no idea going into it that it would be a Christian western which just makes everything all the more complicated and weird.

The best thing I can say about this book is that it was short, and perhaps that it could have more racist than it was. That being said, it was still pretty fuckin racist in all the ways you expect a western novel to be racist; the main character had lived with an (at first unidentified) Native American nation after his family was killed, and they gifted him with an "Indian name," completely ignoring everything about specificity of nation, adoptive practices, naming practices, etc. Then that character spent time with the Cheyenne where he learned apparently how to murder good? How to track good? It was terrible. Then there was a character who was "Sioux" (which, sure, some folks who are Lakota and Dakota might say it that way because white settlers like me don't know any better) who had been to a Christian school and therefore was articulate but mostly was very silent and stoic. (I think I literally highlighted that part and wrote "I want to die.")

And that's just the kind of genre-typical racism, and doesn't even get to the weird mechanics of the book! I have never been a stickler in my life for "show, don't tell," because I think that sort of phrasing is kind of vague and unhelpful, but OH MY GOD this book is a prime example of how telling is way less effective storytelling than showing. And that feels mean to say but again, it's not something I would usually say except that it's so obvious in this book! The plot also feels like... like by the end, the final arcs of all the stories had been wrapped up neatly, but at first it was so hard to separate what was more of a side or establishing plot versus what the actual conflict in the story was going to be? Again, may be a genre thing, I don't read a lot of books like this, but BOY was it weird and made the story feel way more complicated than it needed to be.

You might like this if you uh just really love westerns and are comfortable in the genre? I'm not sure the Christian part of it was any added great element (or if it was supposed to be? are all westerns kinda Christian at their core? I don't know and I don't care to find out!) but as a person who isn't super comfortable with overt Christian tones to stories, I would say that for the most part that element made me roll my eyes but I wasn't like so uncomfortable I couldn't keep going? It wasn't as horrific to me as the overt racism, at least.

This book was... okay? I read it over a very spread out amount of time, which is never good for reading books, but also in part speaks to how this book just didn't grab me. I was convinced by the end that McDonnell was right to identify how the Odawa had been left out of narratives, and I generally believed the power they held over the region. I just got caught up in the details and it made it hard to follow things that were happening. That might be part of the point, but it made for a really difficult read, and the months it took me to read it made it even more difficult. Overall, not a terrible read, and interesting to consider, but not my favorite thing.

I think clearly this is a critical work to think about refusal and how refusal is taken up both by scholars (as in "ethnographic refusal" which ought to be taught waaaaay more often in methods and ethics courses like why don't we talk about that more??) but also as a way of Indigenous politics that is really worth thinking about. I think for NN folks, this is definitely worth thinking about borders and recognition/refusal, and in thinking about what constitutes sovereignty and recognizable sovereignty. I will probably be returning to this at some point, because it's such a critical work and some of it was fairly dense, but I do think it has so much to contribute in terms of thinking about mobility and its limits.

This was really an amazing and challenging read that I know I will go back to! Lyons does a great job of breaking down the arguments he's grappling with, and really makes challenging claims about sovereignty, nationalism, and policing. This is really great stuff I'll be grappling with in my teaching in the future and also gives me so much more to read and consider!

Full disclosure: I received a free ebook of this through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program, and I'd like to thank the publisher for the opportunity to read this!

I had a push-pull relationship with this book as I read it; I had a really hard time getting into the book, as I found the early chapters to be somewhat slow. Part of that is my own struggle with diving into new worlds, but I think part of it was because I weirdly couldn't tell if this was supposed to be set in the real world or in a fantasy land? So much of it is pretty clearly drawn from research, to the point where sometimes, especially early on, it felt like something of an infodump, things that were included to show off the research. That isn't terrible per se, just not really my thing when it comes to incorporating it into the story.

That being said, once I got past the initial hump, I really blew through this book and mostly enjoyed myself! The plot is pretty compelling and moves at a good rapid pace and

the ending definitely leaves you really really wanting the next book!

The characters slowly came to life and the magical aspects of the book are really pretty damn cool and interesting.

I have sort of two major things that make me feel :\ about this book though. The first is a spoiler.

The whole rape plotline was... bizarre. My reaction may be a side effect of the culture we're currently in as I read this book, but having your main character be drugged and nearly raped, only to have her shrug it off and have to continue to work with her abuser just??? I was confused???? By that choice???? Where it seems like it's not that big a deal until the very end?? Idk it just was a weird choice that threw me way off and I was pretty uncomfortable with the way it was handled narratively.

The second thing that made me uncomfortable was the whole thing where it seemed like Nightingale was implying--and maybe I was reading too much into this--that the players were like Rromani people? Which? I had a lot of uncomfortable feelings about in terms of if that was supposed to be taken literally, how I was supposed to grapple with that, were there things being appropriated I just missed out on? I did not see any thanks to a sensitivity reader, maybe Nightingale had one, I'm not sure, but it was something that made me uncomfortable that I wanted to highlight.

I did overall enjoy the story of the book though, and was glad for the opportunity to read it! If you like theater and fantasy Renaissance Europe especially this may really be your thing.

Steedman's book really challenges histories of working class folks by taking her own life and her mother's life and tracing them with some lenses of psychoanalysis and also readings of class consciousness and showing how disconnected those experiences are from dominant narratives about working class life. It sort of feels all over the place, but every part of it reads towards her argument and it's really compelling in the ways she mines her own experience for these pieces. I can't quite explain it, but I found it to be a really interesting, compelling read and I definitely recommend it.

Clark's book was... fine? It didn't make a massive impact on me, mostly because imagining that people had lives outside of stereotypes is... not hugely new to me, but it is interesting for comparing racialization processes in what is now the United States across different colonial experiences. But I got lost at times in the weeds of her archival work and I just wasn't intrigued by it? It wasn't terrible either. If this is your thing, it might be interesting!

Ugh okay. This book tried to do something very interesting, which was put immigration history and indigenous history in conversation, but it just... messed up so much, it was infuriating! It's pretty clear that Hansen's interactions with Dakota people were something that she did not analyze as much as she could have, nor did she engage that much with super significant literature in indigenous history that really would have enriched her work (specifically with regard to boarding schools and the trauma that project inflicted on indigenous people.) She has so many interesting things there she could consider--like what is settler memory here doing, especially in contrast to the kind of settler forgetting and moves to settler indigeneity that she cites with Jean O'Brien's Firsting and Lasting--but it all gets lost as she traces these two separate histories but doesn't consider them really in connection with one another beyond questions about dispossession. She also makes some really dangerous moves--her sections around boarding schools is one, and other where she is calls the Sisseton and Wahpeton Dakota peoples "immigrants" to Spirit Lake, even though they 1) were forcibly removed from their own homelands in Minnesota, and 2) probably had kinship ties with Ihannkthunnwann folks who were living there already. Hansen also keeps making these moves to settler innocence for the settlers she's writing about--she literally at one point goes "the Scandinavian settlers didn't want to participate in settler colonialism" which like 1) if they wanted land, then yes they did, whether it was conscious or not, and 2) it doesn't matter if they wanted to because they did!

It was just infuriating to read, and had she had more contact with indigenous studies as a field, she would have known to think more about kinship and sovereignty as these lenses through which to consider Dakota experience, and to think more about questions of dispossession in that way. I guess the good that came out of this book was the amount of oral histories she did, so someone can go back and use them to write a far better book than this, but this book was such a disappointment in its execution.

This was really fun to read-- it's an oral history with very little analysis but so much you could mine if you were looking for it! The stories Mamie Garvin Fields tells are amazing, she's so rich in her recollections and they're so detailed in the work she and others have done. It's a really great book. I will say that if you're looking for more analysis, Karen Fields's introduction and epilogue are pretty undertheorized and there's little to no analysis, which I think is fine for the book but may not be what you're looking for.