Between Earth and Sky is a powerful and poignant exploration of the residential school system in the US during the late 19th century. It was nice to read about this significant part of history because it continues to have an impact even today. Although the story is based on American residential schools, the story is also relevant to Canadian history.

The story starts in 1906 with Alma Michell reading a newspaper article about an old friend from her days living at her father's residential school. Harry Muskrat is being tried for the murder of a government official.. Alma can't fathom Harry being the culprit who committed this crime and enlists her husband, an attorney, to help prove his innocence. As Alma digs deeper into the situation, old memories come flooding back and Alma is left wondering if her childhood perspective is really as accurate as she once believed.

This story provides the reader with a snapshot of life for the Native American children in the residential school system. The plot contains really only a taste of the abuse that was suffered by these children. In reality, the abuse was much more significant than what is portrayed. However, with that acknowledged, this fictional account did provide an interesting perspective of the sincere efforts of school personnel at Stover residential school to assimilate the Native American students they deemed as "savages" from a patriarchal and racist lens commonly adopted in that era. The story is told through the eyes of Alma both as a child and adult with alternating timelines.

Excellent writing and character development brings the reader into the folds of this story. We form strong attachments to the whole cast be it love, hate, hope, anger, concern, disappointment, sadness, etc. The story is multidimensional in that we can see the characters' covert decisions but also appreciate the layers beneath. In other words, people can be both good and bad. They can make flawed decisions with the best intentions. This is a book that will make you think and feel. At the heart of its message is the suggestion that assimilation created more problems than it solved, leaving a generation of people who were left without any meaningful identity. Truly a captivating read that leaves a lingering impact on the reader.

A gracious thank you to Kensington Books and Amanda Skenandore for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Alma Mitchell is living a "normal" life when a newspaper takes her back to a time and place of her childhood and she has to go back there and help. Her father was a part of creating a school where Indian children were schooled and she was the only white student. The newspaper article is about a school mate and she feels as though she has to go back and help him through this trial.

Although at times it made for hard reading at the same time I appreciated the honesty of including the authentic Indian words and language. It made for slower reading, but it made it a much more honest read and I respected the inclusion of the words.

The thing that stuck out for me with this book was the lesson that is hit on quite a few times was the question - did the lessons and such really help the Indian population? Did "we" really "help" them or were we trying to impose our own ideals on their community? It was hard to take a step outside of myself and my narrative and really question whether the things that these people were doing were helping or harming this community. I wonder what the Indian community would be if "we" hadn't done what we did to/for them.

This wasn't my favorite historical fiction book because the reading experience was difficult, but it was unique and different because of the time period and focus. I can appreciate a book that still teaches me something in an interesting way and opens my eyes to something that I was clueless about before reading.

Between Earth and Sky is an engrossing novel of prejudice, injustice, guilt, love, and so much more. I turned the pages anxious for each chapter to unfold more of this complex story which shifts from Alma's current life to her past growing up at an Indian boarding school run by her father. The characters came alive for me, so much so, that I admit to shedding tears during certain chapters and the ending was unexpected. This book also opened my eyes to a period in history that I had little knowledge of. I anxiously await the next book by this author.

A historical novel set in the American Midwest at the turn of the last century, Between Earth and Sky is the coming of age of Alma, a white girl who befriends the students in her father’s boarding school for Native American children. The book alternates between her time at school, where she witnesses the heartbreaking and abusive tactics of forced assimilation, and years later, when she reads in the newspaper that one of her classmates has been accused of murder and rushes to his side to defend him, dragging her lawyer husband along with her.

I'd love to hear Native perspectives, but my own feeling is that the author, a white woman, handled this material sensitively—she depicted a rich culture but did not presume a Native viewpoint. Alma really grapples with what she was taught, what she feels to be true, and what her Native friends tell (and don't tell) her, and I thought this struggle was the most intriguing aspect of the novel. In all, I was consistently engaged and frequently moved by this dramatic tale of friendship, first love, racism (TW racially motivated violence), injustice, and the terrible consequences of self-righteous white saviorship.

Thank you to the publisher, the Goodreads Giveaway program, and NetGalley for the opportunities to read this novel in advance of its publication date.

Alma is shocked to see a face from her past in the newspaper. Her childhood friend accused of murder. There follows an extended series of flashbacks into the evils of assimilation and civilization doctrine, in which orphaned or kidnapped Native Americans are rigorously, mercilessly instructed in a late-nineteenth-century boarding school alongside their upright headmaster’s daughter. Alma’s compassion, which her cruel mother and teacher attempt to stamp out of her, turns to first love when she falls under the spell of “Harry” (real name Asku). Compelling, heartbreaking and overwhelming in its brutality, Between Earth and Sky will make you as angry as it makes you sigh. It is a romance unlike any you have ever read before. – Maura Tan

This review appears in Romantic Intentions Quarterly #1

This book is the first I've read by this author and I definitely look forward to reading more by her.
I'm not even sure how to describe my feelings with this book since it broke my heart! Excellent,excellent read.
When Alma was a young child her father stared a school for Indian children a “savage-taming” boarding school run by her father. Alma was the only white student there the students all had a super strict teacher. The Indian children don't trust Alma or the other whites there trying to conform them to white ways. They are forced to give up all their customs and their language. All in the name of making them civilized citizens. Now this starts off in 1906 with Alma married and reminiscing about her time back when she was a student at the Indian school back in the late 1800's. The book goes back and forth between the two time periods explaining her time at the Indian school and her growing up years. Her father defends the Indians and says they are not "savages" as a lot say . Her mother on the other hand thinks they far inferior intelligence and will never measure up. As Alma grows up she falls in love with an Indian and he with her. Planning on running away to be with him the ultimate tragedy occurs. My heart absolutely BROKE reading the description of what happened. This tore me up :(
Now in modern time Alma is married but never told her husband about this part of her life. When she finds out one of the Indian students she went to school with all those years ago is being accused of murder of a federal agent. She insists her husband who is a lawyer find facts to prove his innocence. An emotional journey through the wilds of Indian land and your mind this will make this a book for all historical fiction readers a not to miss book to treasure.
Pub Date 24 Apr 2018
I received a complimentary copy of this book from Kensington Books through NetGalley. All opinions expressed are my own.

4 enlightening and engaging historical fiction stars to Between Earth and Sky! ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Alma Mitchell’s childhood friend, Asku, is accused of murdering a federal agent. Alma’s husband is a lawyer, and he agrees to represent Asku at the trial as a favor to her.

When Alma knew Asku, he was a successful student at the residential school for assimilating Native American children, and Alma had been the only white student enrolled because her father was headmaster of the school. The Stover School was designed to strip away the culture and language of its students.

Between Earth and Sky is told in a dual narrative- Alma’s past and Alma’s present. The story is one that will have you questioning the real meaning of justice. This is an important story and truly heartrending. Everyone should know about the existence of these schools in United States’ history. Overall, this was a well-written book and one I’m grateful I read!

Thank you to Amanda Skenandore, Kensington Publishing, and Netgalley for the ARC. Between Earth and Sky will be published on April 24, 2018!

This book is filled with actual facts of the 1870's. There were schools developed that gave the Indian children a chance to read and write, and acclimate to the white man's world. A lot of times these children were just taken from their families. Though there are historical events embroidered through the story, it is fictional. Actual events mentioned are, Wounded Knee Masacre, Sawed and Nelson Act, exploitation of the Indian Tribe's timber rights and of their land.
This story takes place in one of the boarding schools mentioned above. A young girl's excitement in knowing these Indian children. Relationships, betrayal, love, death. All are in this story.
Highly recommended.
5 Stars

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for a free digital ARC. I chose to review this book because the plot seemed very intriguing. I wanted to find out why this lady would be interested in defending the Indian sentenced to death. This book is written from two time frames, the 1900's (current) and the late 1800's (the main character's childhood). I have read many books with a time shift and enjoyed them. However, the time shift in this book was a little distracting. I just couldn't get into the book like I'd like to have.

"After something or someone enters our circle, they travel with us forever, influencing us even if they are not physically present."
A wonderfully written novel of historical fiction alternating in chapters from 1881, when Indian children are brought to a new "white" community and school. The goal of "banishing their wickedness from their souls and guiding them toward lives of industry and righteousness" is to be learned.
In 1906, one of the classmates from the past is accused of murder. This is an indian man who excelled and graduated with honors at this new school and town.
Alma, the daughter of the man who was in charge of this school and is now grown and married, has never forgotten her school friends and feels the need to help her this young man. Can she and will he allow the help?
The story is well done and woven beautifully between the time periods.

Thank you Netgalley and Kensington Books for the ARC.

While education and assimilation might have been good intentions, for the Native American children taken from the Reservations and forced to become copies of White Man, Stover School is a prison.
Alma is the founder's daughter and grows up stuck in the middle between right and wrong. She befriends the children and although they are forced to speak English, she learns some of their native tongue.
This proves to come in handy years later, when one of her former classmates is accused of murder.
Together with Stewart, her lawyer husband, they research the case, in order to find out what really happened.
Between Earth and Sky is an amazing story. Full of indepth characters, it gives us an independent account of both sides of history. It lets the reader decide the good or bad.
The writing is exquisite with clear dialogue and well described surroundings. This book is a gem. I couldn't put it down.

This book...oh this book. I would not have believed it was a debut novel at all.

We start in 1906 where Alma has a good life with an adoring husband. She also has secrets and they are about to disrupt everything she knows and loves.

She grew on a Native American Boarding School/Mission School as her father was the Principal. If you had not heard of them, I strongly suggest this book and then reading some non-fiction on the subject. HEARTBREAKING what was done do these children.

Alma befriends many of the students much to the dismay of her uppity mother. A few students became even her closest friends and maybe even first loves. One of these friends is accused of a crime in 1906 and she must ask her husband (an attorney) to help him.

The book goes between the time she was at the school and 1906. In doing this it helps you grow to understand her and what pushes her to try to save her friend. I had a little bit of knowledge of the boarding schools before this book and after reading it (and after I was done with the kleenex) what I read broke my heart. Thank you Amanda Skenandore for giving this SAD part of our history the respect it deserved for the people who were broken as a result of it.

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC.

While slow in places, this book ultimately surprised me with its poignance. This is the story of Alma, a white girl, told in alternating chapters of her life from ages 7 to 32. She spent 7-17 (1881-91) growing up in her missionary father’s off-reservation boarding school for Indian children. It’s a story of friendships and first love, of heartache/heartbreak, and of damage and loss caused by “assimilation.” And while yes, there were a couple of things that struck me as being unlikely reactions for the time period/situation, they weren’t enough to detract significantly from the story.

The significance of the title is especially affecting as one of the Indian boys describes the white and Indian worlds as “like the sky and earth,...They get very close, but never touch.” There will be tears. Highly recommend.

I absolutely loved this debut novel by Amanda Skenandore, and I look forward to seeing more work from her in the future!

The murder of the government agent by a Native American on a reservation makes national news in 1906. And one women, the daughter of the headmaster of a residential school for Native Americans recognizes the accused Native American as a childhood friend she knew from the school. Against his wishes, she begins an investigation into the case that uncovers so much heartache both from the current time as well as the past. This novel sheds such an interesting light on a time and space that gets very little attention from the authors of historical fiction.

When I discovered in the afterward that the novel was loosely based on actual events and people, it made the story all the more powerful! This is a book that should be at the top of the list for book clubs across America. This provocative and compelling story will generate plenty of robust conversation for all who read it. I highly recommend!

Alma's father is the proud principal of Stover, a school for Indian children to cure them from their savagery and integrate them into the white man's society. From a young age, Alma grows up as the only white student at Stover, doing her best to palliate the stern indoctrination of the teachers and eventually earning the grudging acceptance of the Indians. She receives the name Azaadiins ("little aspen tree"), assuming that they call her this because of her pale skin, and participates with the students in their secret midnight dances as they desperately cling to their old ways of life.

Alma's best friend Asku (renamed Harry Muskrat by the school) has been sent from the reservation to the school by his own father, who believes that in order to succeed in life, the Indians must learn to fit in to the white man's world. And succeed Asku does, achieving so well in his studies that he is accepted to Brown when he graduates. Tumultuous events follow Asku's departure from Stover as the massacre at Wounded Knee causes white folk to narrow their eyes at the Indians--perhaps their savagery cannot be amended and they should be exterminated instead? Alma's own heart is caught up in the midst of the struggle, and she ends up banished from Stover, shut out by the world she never fully understood and bereft of her Indian friends. 

In the twin story strand woven throughout the novel, we meet Alma years later, married to lawyer Steward Mitchell and receiving the alarming news that her friend Asku whom she has not seen for fifteen years is to be tried for murder. Instead of embarking on the glorious career that Alma's father had imagined for him, Asku had returned to the reservation--too Indian to be accepted by the white men, and too white to be accepted by his own people. Alma convinces her husband to travel to the reservation with her and assist in proving Asku's innocence, but along the way, the secrets that she has been hiding in her past must surface, and she must decide whether a true friend honors the wishes of another or tries to "save" them despite their own desires. 

The treatment of Native Americans by the U.S. government is one of the more shameful episodes in our history. Amanda Skenandore explores this subject tenderly, using a narrator whose loyalties are pulled by both worlds, a narrator whose poignant self-discovery saves a difficult subject from becoming distressingly didactic. The book is slow-paced but marches inexorably towards the ending we know must come. This is my favorite book of 2018 so far, and I highly recommend it--as long as you have a tissue box handy.

Disclaimer: I received a review copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley. All opinions expressed in this review are my own.

I have read a lot of great books so far in 2018 (according to my Goodreads Reading Challenge I’m up to 36 books so far this year), and I can honestly say that BETWEEN EARTH AND SKY by Amanda Skenandore is the best one I’ve read so far. Skenandore’s debut novel, which will be published by Kensington on April 24, 2018, is a compelling and heartbreaking historical fiction set in the 1880s and early 1900s. The novel alternates between the main character’s past as the only white child attending the Stover Indian School in Wisconsin, and her present as the wife of a lawyer in Philadelphia in 1906.
In 1906, Alma Blanchard Stewart is living a quiet life with her husband in Philadelphia. One morning, while reading the newspaper, she learns that a Native American man was arrested in Wisconsin for killing one of the Indian agents on the reservation. Alma knows the man who was arrested – he was her childhood friend from the Stover Indian School. Convinced that her friend has been wrongly accused, she and her reluctant husband travel to Wisconsin with the intention to uncover the truth and help set Asku Muskrat free. Alma’s mission forces her to confront her past, and leads her to realize that the assimilation of Native American’s into white culture left the children of the Stover Indian School damaged and destroyed as they were never accepted by white people and they were estranged from their families on the reservations. Alma also learns that life on the reservation is not how she imagined it would be.
As a child, Alma’s father moved her and her mother from Philadelphia to La Crosse, Wisconsin in the early 1880s so that he could open up the Stover Indian School. At the time, people believed that the only way for the Native Americans to survive was to assimilate them into white culture. To do that, numerous Indian Schools were opened throughout the country to educate Native American children. The children were taken from their families on the reservations and then moved to the Indian Schools where they were forced to adapt to white society. Through Alma’s perspective, Skenandore shows what it was like for the Native American children. Upon arrival at the school, they are stripped of their native clothing and belongings. Their hair is shorn, they are given Christian names, and they are forbidden from speaking in their native languages. They are robbed of the identity. Alma’s father, as well as the other white people who work at the school, believe that what they are doing is the right thing. Even though Alma is a child, she questions what they are going to the native children. As Alma grows up alongside the native children, she learns their customs and their languages. But it is when she falls in love with one of the native boys and asks for permission to marry him that Alma realizes that she is the only one at the Stover Indian School who sees the Native Americans as her equals.
I was absolutely blown away by BETWEEN EARTH AND SKY. The story is very compelling, and I love how Alma’s present plays out alongside her past. As the only white child attending the Stover Indian School, Alma is stuck in a difficult situation. She is supposed to be an example for the native children, but she also wants to be their friend. She becomes caught up in the gray area – she is a white woman who knows about and embraces not only the Native American people but their culture as well. The reader witnesses how Alma’s grows and reshapes her opinions as she learns more about the Native Americans and their plight. The story is also a heartbreaking one not only for Alma, but for all of the Native American children who were forced to attend the Stover Indian School. This is a novel about losing one’s native identity while trying to establish a place in a world that is not yet receptive to people who are not white.

Amanda Skenandore’s debut novel, Between Earth and Sky, looks at those deplorable Indian residential schools established in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States and Canada. In these schools, children were forced to abandon their Native American identities and cultures, forbidden to speak their own languages. Many cases of physical, emotional and sexual abuse—atrocities performed in the guise of assimilating young Native Americans into “white” culture while committing cultural genocide of the Native American language and customs.

While Between Earth and Sky blends the “past” of the 1880s with the “present” of thhe 1900s, there is not sufficient a time difference to expect “white” cultural attitudes towards Manifest Destiny to change. So there is some projection of twenty-first century perspectives here onto the said Manifest Destiny prevailing at that time.

I would have liked to have seen a greater depth of response from Alma towards the two Native American deaths she experiences first hand. The level of her reaction seems less than warranted for the violent deaths of a lover and a dear friend. At the same time, Stewart, her husband’s reaction to learning that his wife was not the pristine woman he’d assumed, but that she’d had sexual intercourse with what he considered a sub-human male, was resolved overnight—again, a depth of emotion that seemed insufficient for the situation.

A slow paced but poignant exploration of the treatment of Native Americans in history from the point of view of a young, coming of age girl. Alma, the main character, is a young white girl in a unique position of growing up among Native American children at her father's boarding school for "civilizing" them. Naturally, she befriends them, and like them, she is caught between two worlds, but does she truly understand them and their situation? As an adult, she has to the face the ghosts of this past.

I really enjoyed the way this story was told, set in two time periods but told in parallel to each other. I know lots of book have used this method before, but few do it quite so well as this one. It's slow paced, but never boring. The chapters set in 1906 hint and foreshadow at something significant that happened in the past, while the chapters set in the past slowly evolve to show you what happened. Eventually, the past catches up and it all comes to a head.

Beautifully written with realistic, three dimensional, sympathetic characters, and complex relationships, this is easily the best novel on this subject matter I've read so far. I definitely look forward to what this debut author has to offer in the future.

I just had the pleasure of a free afternoon and a pre-release reading of "Between Earth and Sky" by Amanda Skenandore! The story starts in the late 1800's when the central character's father opens an Indian School to basically strip young native Americans of their culture and save their heathen souls. The book brings up a disturbing bit of our country's History and the unjust cruel treatment of native Americans. I really enjoyed this book and strongly recommend it to any historical fiction fan!

This compelling novel tells the story of a girl, Alma, whose father runs a residential school on the Wisconsin-Minnesota border. The book shifts between Alma's childhood and her attempts as an adult to intervene in, and perhaps atone for, the effects of the school and white society in general on one of her Anishinaabe friends who is on trial for the murder of a reservation agent. The book is not a mystery but holds the reader's attention with the delicate unfolding of dreams, secrets, and relationships against the backdrop of an oppressive system that, with hindsight, some would call outright genocide. This book provides a good starting point for thinking about the atrocities committed against American Indians; I would even recommend it to young adult readers (there are only a few scenes of a violent or sexual nature).