Alexandra Fuller’s exploration of contemporary Native American life follows the lives of cousins Rick Overlooking Horse and You Choose Watson as they each navigate their path through an often difficult and conflicted existence. Each chooses a different approach; one tries to live peacefully, the other chooses violence, and their lives become inextricably entwined. It’s not so much a conventional narrative as a series of vignettes, taking the reader deep into the reservation and examining issues of heritage, ancestry, oppression and continuing injustices. It’s a thoughtful book, and delves deep into Lakota culture and heritage and felt to me to be authentic and empathetic. Some reviewers have criticised the book for not accurately reflecting Native American life, but without really explaining what they mean, and for me Fuller succeeds in her depiction and it all felt convincing. I enjoyed the book on the whole although the sometimes disjointed narrative style and the short chapters irritated and I never quite felt I’d really got to know the central characters. Nevertheless it’s a thoughtful and thought-provoking novel and well worth reading.

4★
“Rick Overlooking Horse said this time of night was for old people and children, the keepers of the wisdom. People in the middle of their years were busier, often doing unwise things, he said. They needed their sleep.”

So where do YOU fit into the scheme of things? Old or young and thoughtful? Or busy and unwise and tired? This is an unusual debut novel from a published author of non-fiction. Fuller, born in England and raised in southern Africa, has channelled her ‘inner Lakota’ to write the story of two Indian boys raised by Mina, who’s been wet-nursing foster babies for many years. [The word Indian is used throughout.]

It’s a quirky story, with tales of the Rez (reservation) injustice, poverty, myth, tradition and plenty of humour, some of it pretty dark. I think much of it applies to many peoples of the world, and not necessarily just First Nations. Some religions and belief systems see the Big Picture in similar ways.

First, some fun:

About her name, Le-a (NOT “Leah”) shouts:

And she hollered and yelled her name, the correct pronunciation of it, 'You can’t read? What’s wrong with you? The dash ain’t silent. It’s Ladasha, you asshole. Ladasha!'"

A couple of their gangs, the CIA and FBI: “Colonized Indian Asses, they called each other. CIA, for short . . .FBIs, they called themselves. Full-blood Indians.”

When a car broke down:

“Rezercise, they called it, when your car bottomed out and you had to walk.”

When a guy who claims to be part Seminole Indian comes to a protest.

“But the Indians called him the Small Nosebleed Indian, because they said a mild hemorrhage from a single nostril was all it would take to get rid of every last drop of his native blood.”

The characters:

The boys are very different and a real handful, but Mina’s tough, and she’s done this for so long, she’s worked out a chart.

“The year she got the boys, Mina Overlooking Horse drew two round bundles with wide-open mouths that represented the boys, and a bigger stick figure with a straight-across mouth that represented her. She wrote the number 216, and underneath it, the number 12 . Then she drew a line under that, and wrote 204. Every Winter Count after that, the stick figures of the children grew taller and thinner, and the stick figure that represented her grew shorter and fatter. And every year, Mina Overlooking Horse subtracted another 12 months from her sentence as reluctant caretaker.”

Rick Overlooking Horse grows up to be an activist while You Choose Watson (later You Choose What Son, because he like the sound of it), as Mina put it, “was born half Cowboy, half Indian, and—as Mina liked to say afterward—the missing half of each.”

Rick goes off by himself to live a more traditional life on the land but travels to join protests for Indian land rights, while You Choose becomes a drunk politician (among other things), and is pretty much the waste of space that Mina predicted.

Back to the philosophical bits.

In her foreword, Fuller describes some Lakota attitudes which she found similar to what she had learned in southern Africa (and which wouldn’t be out of place in describing many cultures or belief systems). Time is circular and comes around again and again, even as one person’s time runs out.

She mentions that Christians in the 1950s tried to explain things, treating time as linear, putting one foot in front of the other, “accounting for all the time between birth and death, but accounting for none of the time between death and birth.”

Between death and birth. Whether you’re thinking of reincarnation or living now 'among' your ancient ancestors (who are sometimes considered to be stars or in the stars), there are other belief systems (religions) that allow for a more circular idea of time.

How the world works. Mina explained to the boys:

“Like that breath you just took. In the beginning, a dinosaur breathed that breath. Then a tree. Then an ant. Then you, now me. And maybe it’ll be You Choose next. Or maybe that breath will sink to the bottom of the ocean for one of those blind, ugly fish. Or maybe it will be someone’s dying breath. You see? They say you just borrowed that breath. It wasn’t yours to begin with and it won’t be yours to end with.”

Kinship – skinship. The author says “it takes being born Indian to understand the intricacies of kinship. Skinship, the youth say.”

The Aborigines of Australia have complicated kinship groups and skin names, for much the same reason, and they probably aren’t the only ones outside of the Lakota.

I found this an interesting and entertaining book to read. While I take some of the uniqueness of the Lakota with a grain of salt, I appreciate their problem and that they represent similar problems with so many people stuck in this position – basically those who’ve been unwillingly colonised. They’ve lost their battles, they’ve been confined to ever diminishing reserved areas, and they’re expected to forego their identity to become just another cog in the machinery of the industrialised world.

Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Press for the copy for review from which I’ve quoted (so some quotes may have changed).

The culture and oppression of the Lakota Oglala is well told in this story of two cousins, and the diverse directions their life choices takes them. I am not certain, though, that the author, a white woman, is fully qualified to basically speak for the Lakota Oglala, however much time she spent with them. Only my opinion.

While I understand that Fuller feels a kinship with Native Americans and while I am open to a variety of voices, this wasn't well written or uniquely plotted enough to overcome the concept of a white African woman writing about Native American males. I very much liked Fuller's non-fiction, which can be tough to read, in part because it's so honest about her experience. Here she's taken someone else's experience and novelized it. It just didn't ring true. Can't recommend this one.

BookFilter Review: Writer Alexandra Fuller is an expert in cultural appropriation, intentional and not. She was raised in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in a childhood dominated by violence and drinking and the constant battle to hold onto "their" land, a word in quotes that Fuller explored brilliantly in her debut memoir "Don't Lets Go To The Dogs Tonight." Her parents and a lover inspired several more memoirs and now Fuller has embraced fiction with "Quiet Until The Thaw." A white woman born in England and growing up in Africa, Fuller says she felt a sense of coming home, of kinship among the Lakota Oglala Sioux Nation peoples of South Dakota. Saying, in essence, yeah, she doesn't really care if you don't think this is "her" story. She weaves a tale spanning generations and wars, from Vietnam to Desert Storm; a story of cousins who respond to the unceasing burden of life in very different ways; a myth of beginnings and ends and beginnings again. Fuller gets deep under the skin of the world view of the Lakota, never ennobling them in some awful patronizing way but honoring them by telling this particular, unvarnished story of prison and murder and babies born in a storm and strong women and indifferent White People and sadness and not joy exactly but endurance. A black-humored streak and Lakota language and Lakota myth are woven throughout. It's funny and distinctive and utterly unlike anything Fuller has done before except that it feels risky and alive. -- Michael Giltz

As an enrolled member of the Tohono O'odham nation (the tribe that is called Pima and Maricopa in this book) and a former resident of one of the Eight Northern Pueblos, I went into this book prepared to be very critical. I'm extremely uncomfortable about the idea of a white woman writing about the experiences of Native people, especially when said white woman grew up in colonial Africa. I am against the idea that any white person should write from the point of view of a Native person. They will always get it wrong. It's offensive to think that white writers can write about a group of people that have faced years of cultural oppression and genocide by white people. It's offensive that a white person would try to write about that kind of horror, and the strength a cultural group needs to survive it. Along those lines I am very wary of non-Native people who claim to feel an affinity with Native culture, and who claim to gain a spiritual acceptance of this culture. Sherman Alexie touches on this very well in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian when a white man crashes the funeral of Junior's grandmother. ("I'm not Indian, but I FEEL Indian in my bones," this white man intones, dressed head to toe in "authentic" Native garb.) In an introductory letter that was included in my advanced reader's copy, Alexandra Fuller writes "The Rez and the people who live there made sense to me on a blood and bone level", so before the novel even begins she is falling into a cliched defense and justification of why she is qualified to write this story. Well, she may feel Indian in her bones, but being Indian means more than just feeling some connection. "To be back among the lively dead of the Lakota . . . was to find myself shocked into a completely unexpected homecoming, if home is where your soul can settle in recognition," she goes on to write. As a Native woman I am offended and grieved that a white woman, who has lived as an oppressor of people of color, is now laying claim to the ancestors of Native people. I am also worried that I see so many reviews of this book where a non-Native reviewer seems to think that Fuller's experiences growing up in Africa gives her a special insight into cultures that are not hers. I would think her upbringing as a privileged white girl in a country where her servants were all African natives would make her less qualified to write a book about the Oglala Lakota Sioux, not more qualified.

I really wanted to get an ARC of this book because I know Fuller's books are usually very popular and gain a lot of media attention. Quiet Until the Thaw could be very widely read, especially since so many people have read and loved Fuller's memoirs and other non-fiction work. When I heard that Fuller's first novel would be about the experiences of two Lakota men I was concerned that non-Native people would read it and come away from it thinking they understood Native people and their culture, based on this short novel written by a white woman. Netgalley and Penguin Press approved a digital ARC for me, and I sat down to read this book, trying to keep an open mind. Since I have never read any of Fuller's other work, I had nothing to compare her writing to, and the first surprise to me was that her writing was excellent. It's spare, yet elegant, and has some dry humor. If she had written a novel about the lives of two white men, I would probably have loved this book. If she had written about observing Native people from the point of view of a white character I would have scoffed, but I would have accepted a story about a white person's observations of a group she hasn't been born to, and hasn't grown up in.

Instead, Fuller chose to write about growing up Oglala Lakota, from the point of view of Oglala Lakota people. I think this why she falls so easily into the traps of creating characters that are very typically "Indian". They have "Indian" names. They are sent to "boarding school". They live in "tar paper lean-tos". They refer to "the rez" ad nauseum. They put up with being called names like "Diesel Engine" by the white characters. Fuller often uses the collective "we" when writing about "Indian thought". She constantly refers to "White Man" throughout this book as if she is desperate to distance her own white heritage from that of the perceived evilness of this horrifying, oppressive "White Man". The "Indian-ness" of this book is screaming at the top of its lungs that it's about the INDIAN EXPERIENCE. And it's not. It's about a white woman's perspective of the Indian experience. From a white woman's perspective, Indian people have names like You Choose What Son. From a white woman's perspective the main characters extended family are referred to en mass as "Extended Relations" and even when referred to individually, have no names. From a white woman's perspective Indian culture is irrevocably broken by their trials and tribulations. There are many, many instances in this novel when the hardships of Native people are written about in an almost reverent manner. Alexandra Fuller seems to take a romantic view of the attempted genocide and assimilation of our country's Indigenous people, and this is not fun to read about, since only a person who has never faced the consequences of genocide and assimilation would write about it in these terms. There is very much a tone of "Ah, the poor Indians who used to roam free. How sad and broken they are now that they have lost everything." (I will include quotes to back this up as soon as I am able to procure a finished copy; I don't want to quote something that may not appear in the final edition.)

Fuller also ends up writing about a white person's usual stereotypes of Native people, although I'm sure this was not her intention. The two main characters of this book are You Choose Watson (who later becomes You Choose What Son) and Rick Overlooking Horse. From the time Rick is introduced as a character you know he is a cliche of a white person's idea of a Native person. He is quiet "even for an Indian" and inscrutable. As he grows older he becomes the wise, medicine man who lives alone, and raises horses. He is clearly the "sacred Indian", the "stoic Indian", the Indian who knows the rhythms of the earth, and is resigned to the suffering of his people. By contrast, You Choose ingests three bags of sugar to get out of military service and lives off the land in a commune where he avoids all hard work (the "lazy Indian" or the "irresponsible Indian"). He later develops a drinking problem (the "drunk Indian") and becomes a corrupt leader of the Lakota people (the "sneaky Indian"). It's perhaps unfair of me to fault Alexandra Fuller for falling into the trap of writing such stereotypes, especially since aspects of You Choose's character is clearly based on the real-life Dick Wilson, former chairperson of the Oglala Lakota Sioux people. Writers like Leslie Marmon Silko, Sherman Alexie, and Louise Erdrich have written Native characters that also drink and sneak and cheat, and I don't fault them for it. But I don't appreciate Fuller's appropriation of these characteristics of the Indian people she writes because she is not Indian. No matter how much time she spends with them, no matter how much she feels part of their inner circle, no matter what affinity she feels for Native people, she simply does not, and will never, understand what it is to grow up Native, and to live with your Native-ness every day. Therefore, I don't think it's OK for her to write about such cliched Indians, or for her to write about Indians at all. Leave Native people to write Native characters, drunk and sneaky as they may be. In this novel Alexandra Fuller takes it on herself to explain "the rez" and the Native lifestyle which (again) I believe should be left to Native writers.

As the book wears on Fuller's white guilt glimmers through several scenes, and her ignorance of Native sovereignty comes across when a character urges another character to call tribal cops instead of "the troopers" since she wants to keep the crime among the Indians. (State troopers have no jurisdiction on Indian reservations, so Indian people don't call them to report crime; they call tribal police. Only tribal police and federal agents can investigate crimes committed on Native land.) At the end of the book her narrative pokes fun at Indians succumbing to their own stereotypes, although the entire novel perpetuates Native stereotypes. She does what she probably thought was the "correct" thing to do when writing about young Indian men cutting off their hair. But it's the very end of the book where her misunderstanding, and ultimately disrespect, of Indigenous people comes through. In her narrative of Indian people I guess Alexandra Fuller believes that all Indians will sell out their heritage and culture to the white man for his entertainment, then return to their reservation as chastened failures, ready to carry on another generation of living Indian. Ultimately white people are just fine with the beauty and mystery of Indian people, who are so brave and noble in the face of all their suffering, as long as they stay on their reservations, and work on being as brave and noble as white people want them to be. As long as Indians can stay in their place, practicing their sacred traditions for white people to feel a connection to in their bones, then white people can be happy with them. But heaven forbid they venture out to the wider world where they will never learn that the White Man will constantly be looking to exploit them. Better to stay on the rez where non-Indians can pity their poverty and marvel at their innate understanding of the Great Spirit. It's interesting that Alexandra Fuller wrote stereotypical Indians, who fall into a stereotypical life of exploitation, and return to where they belong. I wonder if these characters will someday run into a white writer who claims their lifestyle makes sense to her "on a blood and bone level." I wonder how they will feel when this writer publishes a novel that claims to speak for them.

The sad thing is, non-Native people will think this book is great. When Native people point out its flaws we will be chided for being too sensitive.

I received this ARC from netgalley.com in exchange for a review.

A quick read at 250+ pages, Rick Overlooking Horse and You Choose Watson are cousins whose personalities are defined by their choices and circumstances.

The story is kind of disjointed. Throughout the book, I'm thinking the author is trying to say something but I'm unable to decipher what it is ... then I read the book description again and decided this must be it. As Fuller writes, "The belief that we can be done with our past is a myth. The past is nudging at us constantly."

2.5☆ rounded up to 3☆

3+ stars

What first drew me to this book was the beautiful title. I didn't know until I received an advanced copy of it that it was a name from a Swampy Cree poem. One of the characters Rick Overlooking Horse doesn't talk very much so he is compared to the woman in the poem. The names and their meanings and the reasons why people are named as they are is just one of the things that fascinated me in learning some of the culture of the Lakotas that is reflected in the story.

I was hoping to love this book more than I did, but from the beginning it felt a bit disjointed. I don't usually have any problems with a narrative moving back and forth in time and from character to character, but here I felt that there was something about the narrative structure that kept the characters at a distance . There are definitely interesting and profound things about the culture and history the Lakotas that I learned and was moved by.

Rick Overlooking Horse and You Choose Watson, raised on the Lakota Oglala Sioux Reservation in South Dakota by their Grandmother Mina Overlooking Horse so differently facing their futures. The book touches on the experiences of young Native American in boarding schools, in the military, in prison but reflecting the most on the life on the Rez . The culture, customs and beliefs, the history and present story that of this Native American tribe was definitely enlightening. There are several 4 and 5 star reviews on Goodreads that I would recommend that perhaps do more justice to this book that I could. I think it is an important story to tell even though I was unable to fully connect with the narrative. The author spent three months in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota and her connection with this people is evident in her first work of fiction.

I received an advanced copy of this book

While I am not someone who believes that each of us should only write about our own experience, Alexandra Fuller's well-meaning but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to write the lives of American Indians ends up sounding more like parody, or simply an experiment gone terribly wrong.

I've read and enjoyed Alexandra Fuller's memoirs before so was looking forward to this, her first fiction book.

As billed: "A complex tale that spans generations and geography, Quiet Until the Thaw conjures with the implications of an oppressed history, how we are bound not just to immediate family but to all who have come before and will come after us, and, most of all, to the notion that everything was always, and is always, connected."

The Lakota Ogala Sioux nation in South Dakota--over time and the lives of several characters, particularly You Choose Watson [loved the telling of how he got his name], Rick Overlooking Horse, Mina Overlooking Horse, Squanto, Le-a, and more.

All the characters in this well-written and spare novel were well drawn and their stories were interesting--but the book didnt grab me. Heartbreak and humor and totally believable. BUT. A solid 3.5 for me, but not rounding up.

Alexandra Fuller's Quiet Until the Thaw is a compelling novel that manages to be funny and sad, satiric and sincere, clever...and deadly serious about the history of the government's policies concerning Native Americans and the way those policies have played out.

In a portion about the forced removal of children from their families to place them in Indian Boarding Schools (which were mostly shut down by 2007), Rick Overlooking Horse and You Choose Watson are caught running to escape the Bureau of Indian Affairs officers who are chasing them. Another boy is caught along with Rick and You Choose--Billy Mills, the fasted kid on the Rez, but even he is not fast enough to escape.

A paragraph or so later, there is a mention of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, and an announcer is shouting: "Look at Mills! Look at Mills!" Billy Mills couldn't run fast enough to escape the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but he eventually won a gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics--for real.

It is this mixture of real people and real events along with the fictional stories of Rick Overlooking Horse, You Choose Watson, Squanto, and Le-a Brings Plenty that gives the novel a quiet authority.

The problems and history of life on the Rez are not avoided or minimized, but they are not treated in the way one would expect. The problems are part of the story and part of the characters who inhabit the novel.

From early on, Fuller makes a point of how many Indians have filled the ranks of the military over the years from WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and through Desert Storm. Squanto, during Desert Storm has reason to remember what Rick Overlooking Horse has told him:
"Remember this: There will be nothing to signal the start of your war. There will be nothing to signal its end. There's just your war. Only you will know it when it has started, and only you can choose when it will end."

The novel shifts from character to character and from event to event, and I loved Fuller's prose which kept me engaged the entire time. I've pondered this review for the last ten days or so and find myself unable to genuinely relate how good I think the book is. I've written entire paragraphs and deleted them. For infinitely better and more thorough reviews, check out Sam and Nancy's reviews on Goodreads.

In a flashback at the end of the book, Rick Overlooking Horse has been telling the "wonderful, terrible tales of how the whole world came to be," to young Daniel and Jerusalem Brings Plenty and Jerusalem asks, "how does it end?"

The old man replies, "It ends well. It doesn't end soon, but it ends well. All of it."

Don't miss this one.

NetGalley/Penguin Group.

Native American/Social Commentary. June 27, 2017. Print length: 288 pages.

"Life is a circle and we as common people are created to stand within it and not on it. I am not just of the past but I am the past. I am here. I am now and I will be for tomorrow." Oglala Lakota maxim

Alexandra Fuller spent most of her life in Africa. In her letter which opens the galley of her debut novel Quiet Until the Thaw she writes that in encountering the Lakota Oglala Sioux she found an "unexpected homecoming, if home is where your soul can settle in recognition." The Native Americans were the only kindred spirits she had found in America. The love she bears her subject shines through every word and page and image.

On the Tex in the 1940s, two orphaned boys are suckled by a resentful Mina Overlooking Horse. At age forty she has raised a child every year for twenty-four years. She counts the years until the boys will be grown.

Rick Overlooking Horse keeps his words to himself, while You Choose Watson is determined to wreck his anger on the world, even to the point of self-destruction. Mina teaches Rick Overlooking Horse that the world is; nothing is taken away, nothing is added. He seeks to understand why he is in the world here, now.

Rick Overlooking Horse does not resist being drafted and sent to Vietnam; You Choose Watson fakes illness to avoid the draft. Rick Overlooking Horse survives horrendous injury. You Choose Watson escapes into drugs and alcohol and women, only intensifying his suffering.

The boys reach manhood and impact their world, each in their own way. Rick is at peace with a traditional way of life, a teacher of the old ways. You Choose struggles and lashes out. Both become involved with the American Indian Movement and the protest at Wounded Knee.

It is the context of the boy's stories that sets the novel apart: Fuller's awareness of the Lakota understanding of reality; the reminders that white society cut the native way of life at the root, leaving their people rudderless and lost in an alien reality, and suffering the homelessness of living where your people have always lived yet not able to recognize your own land.

Fuller's authorial voice is often heard, interjecting thoughtful insight into the Native American experience. In writing beautiful and eloquent, she charges the novel with emotional intensity and devastating revelation.

Fuller's previous books were memoirs and nonfiction. Her experiences in Africa inform her insight into the Native American experience.
"While she has not written anything overtly political, she says that everything we do is political from the decision we make to wake up in the morning to the clothes we put on our bodies, to the words we have the courage to speak.
"Africa is a great teacher," she has explained. "We're not a good example of much, but we're a terrible warning of power run amok and of the long, high price of oppression."
http://www.barclayagency.com/site/speaker/alexandra-fuller

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Lakota Oglala Sioux Nation, South Dakota

A provocative story of an ancient tribe, an honorable history, an uncertain future, and the people who carry their voices forward.

Grandmother Mina Overlooking Horse raised the two cousins, Rick Overlooking Horse and You Choose Watson who were born within a few weeks of each other and were left with her to raise. She had to make sense about their choices to be born at the particular time in history to their particular parents. Their paths will turn out very differently, while their family bond will forever define them as branches from the same tree.

You Choose Watson's father was Elijah Watson.
"Cowboy, who went under the name of Elijah Watson, but he wasn't much of that. All hat and no cattle, as they say."

In this way, You Choose Watson was born half Cowboy, half Indian, and--as Mina liked to say afterward--the missing half of each. Which is to say the boy was born with an itinerant Cowboy as a father and a sore-hearted Indian girl as a mother." February, 1944.

Mina Overlooking Horse bore Thompson White Feather three sons, which she named:

Nodody Overlooking Horse;
Anybody Overlooking Horse;
Somebody Overlooking Horse.

By giving them these names she was hoping that misfortune would pass them by since there was no power in any of the names.

Alas, it did not work quite that way. Nobody died of pneumonia, Anybody died of a disease he contracted during his stint as an airman in New Guinea.

Only Somebody survived. He pursued death in everything he did and was left with broken ribs, smashed molars, a pulverized ear, a broken nose, a broken jaw, and crushed testicles manifested to Somebody as little more than a dull annoyance, a slight hindrance. Mina said: "It's hard to tell why he doesn't just shoot hisself and be done with it."... And a lot of anger!

-----

Rick Overlooking Horse, son of Nobody Overlooking Horse, made an honest living on the Rez. He served in the military, was a kind of unrecognized hero, and disabled after being serious wounded. He aint' taking money from the White government, won't use their diseased money either. Rick only wants peace. Right out there on his own, away from all the other residents.

But his cousin, You Choose Watson, had other plans when he returned back to the Rez. As early as their fourth year on this earth as young boys, then living with their grandmother Mina Overlooking Horse, You Choose Watson shot Rick Overlooking Horse in his leg with a bow and arrow. Rick did not cry. And You Choose did not apologize. It was just the way it was.

His grandmother, Mina, told You Choose that his anger was his own doing, like his birth: "You could have been born when you had the chance to hunt buffalo, and live the way of All Our Ancestors. Yeah, and don't look at me like that, little Tapeworm. You ain't my doing, You're your doing."

Rick Overlooking Horse had his own ideas on choices:
Although to be fair to the choosers, Rick Overlooking Horse figured, perhaps almost all choices are mostly illusion given that almost all people seemed to be in a prison of their own making:

Mina Overlooking Horse in a prison of resentment;
You Choose Watson in a prison of need;
some of the More Concerned Immediate Relations in a prison of fear, despair, and/or anger.

And for certain almost all people are in a prison of someone else’s making. The way Rick Overlooking Horse saw it, one go-around, for example, a person might be a Oglala Lakota Oyate with the whole, high plains of buffalo to hunt. Next go-around, he’s a Red Nigger orphan stuck with corn- meal, commodity cheese and beans, and Mina Overlooking Horse for a caretaker. Was that your choice, really?
You Choose Watson knew his way around town. Like in 1962 when he was drafted for military service, which did not go down well with him. What did go down splendidly, was the three pound bags of sugar he consumed before his interview. It was sheer genius, honestly. With double vision, two days of dizziness and light-headedness, mild sweats and nausea, You Choose hiccuped and burped himself out of the draft. "Diabetes" - were written in his rejection letter. Unfit for military service in Asia. Once again, he got away.

However, many years later, when You Choose thought he could get away with his shenanigans again, he suddenly had to deal with Le-a Brings Plenty. It would be worse than incarceration and hell combined.

-----

Le-a Brings Plenty, had her Great fertility Crisis, which Squanto had to address. Especially in winter, when there were not many job opportunities in the Rez. Her babies were calling her from the other side, she could hear them.

But Le-a had to figure out her own lineage, ever since her mother Thunder Hawk went over to Israel and came back pregnant. There was no story to tell, apart from her speech to an audience at an event to honor local leaders of indigenous groups around the world.
I am Thunder Hawk Brings Plenty from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. I wish I did not know what I know,” she said. “I wish my people were on their land, and that I did not need to be here.”

There was a rustle through the audience.

“They can say what they like about what happened to Indians in my land. They can rewrite history, and erase our stories. But what my mind hasn’t been allowed to know, my body has always known,” Thunder Hawk said. “I am an undeniable, inconvenient body of knowledge. Read me.”

And then Thunder Hawk Brings Plenty stood in silence for fifteen minutes in front of her live audience.
Mysteriously, without Squanto's help, Le-a herself delivered twin boys whom she named Daniel and Jerusalem. Le-a herself was not willing to explain how it happened. Perhaps she might not even know herself.


COMMENT
In this illuminating novel, Alexandra Fuller contributes historical and social insight into the Lakota Oglala Sioux Nation, South Dakota, with a strong voice in a gripping narrative. Her prose is picturesque, rich in texture and color; endearing, and honest. The story line moves from one main character to other, with back flashes into their history and the people who played a role in their character formation.

The Overlooking Horse family, and the ties that bind them to their heritage, traditions, language, and customs are so alive and vibrant in this gripping tragicomedy.

In her memoirs of her life in Africa, Alexander Fuller used the same style to report the hardship and happiness of her own family. The laughter most often comes with tears in the eyes. It's just her way with words.

Quiet Until The Thaw is certainly not meant to be funny at all, but the author lightens a dark, somber narrative up with wit and humor, keeping the reader bonded to the otherwise tragic tale.

It's a beautiful story! Alexandra Fuller is a new voice in the novel world. She is telling the stories that would otherwise be forgotten. She gives the little people a space to sing their songs to their own rhythms and she does it splendidly.

I want to thank Netgalley, Penguin Press and Alexander Fuller for the opportunity to review this debut novel which is scheduled for publication in June 2017.

A great read. RECOMMENDED