The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
by Sherman Alexie
illustrated by Ellen Forney
It's about a kid trying to escape from his home before it's too late. While he still has enough fresh hot air in his balloon to pull him out of the suck that is reservation life. He's a kid who loses most of his battles but seems not to know when to stop fighting. A kid you gotta pull for.
The drinking connection comes in when he quotes his grandmother,
"Drinking would shut down my seeing and my hearing and my feeling," she used to say. "Why would I want to be in the world if I couldn't touch the world with all of my senses intact?"
I can answer her question--to stop seeing a world where some children die for lack of food and other children suffer from too much food. To stop hearing the creaks in your joints as they rust and decay and you know a day will come when they don't carry you through another day. To blunt the feelings of bone-weary boredom when you work at a dead-end job that pays too little to keep gas in the car that drives you to the job.
But I digress--this isn't what the book is about. It's a funny book, and a good one. I recommend.
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