Drawing on Sherman Alexie’s personal experience growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is a young adult novel that has more to say about big virtues like tolerance than a whole shelf of earnest adult tomes could ever manage. The book’s unflinching candor, irreverent comedy, and fierce alertness to difficult issues have made it a subject of controversy and a frequent target for book-banning school boards. But what’s most valuable about it is that Alexie’s novel is controversial in the way life itself is controversial: unsettled, uneasy, of two minds about itself and nevertheless ongoing, devastating one day and comic the next.