3.0

I can recognize that this is a decent book, while also stating that it’s not for me. If it were print, I would never have finished it, so thank goodness for audiobooks.

I picked this up because Joseph Bruchac is an important indigenous writer in the middle grade to YA market and I wanted to get a sense of what and how he writes for recommendation purposes. I can now safely say that I should not recommend it to people like me. Fortunately, there are a lot of people in this world who are not like me.

So good things: history! I learned so much about Navajo code talkers. I knew nothing about them before picking up this book. There’s also a good chunk of the book about residential schools, which has direct curriculum connections and which makes it a great book to promote around Orange Shirt Day.

The things that didn’t match my preference: the writing style was very factual and read very much like a memoir or a piece of non-fiction. Also... I’m just not really into war stories. War and all the details of battle? No thank you.

Some themes: war; friendship; contributions of the Navajo people during WW2; residential schools; native language;