Quiet Until the Thaw

April 24, 2017
In her first novel, Fuller—English by birth but raised in Zimbabwe and now living in Wyoming—conjures the story of a group of Lakota Sioux struggling to make sense of their lives on the rez. A taciturn Indian boy named Rick Overlooking Horse and his rambunctious cousin, You Choose Watson, are raised by their grandmother until they are shipped off to the white man’s boarding school in Oklahoma. Even so, Rick is wise from an early age. After being badly maimed in Vietnam, he returns home to pitch a teepee and grow sacred weed on a piece of empty land that becomes a place of pilgrimage. His people come for advice, and for purification. And though he does not think of himself as their leader, when he travels to Wounded Knee they follow him to form what becomes the momentous protest of 1973. You Choose avoids military service but ends up in prison, after a stint as a corrupt and violent tribal chairman during the period when the American Indian Movement is at its zenith. While You Choose serves time, Rick raises twin boys, wards of a feisty Lakota woman named Le-a, who after her own defiant youth makes sure the orphans learn the ways of their ancestors. But when You Choose returns to the rez, tragedy ensues, and the twins, too, must find their own way. Fuller’s keen sense of engagement with a land “to which you now don’t belong,” and her place as an outsider, make her a sympathetic storyteller. Her prose shimmers and vibrates with life in this excellent novel.

April 15, 2017
A lyrical tale of life on the Rez.British-born Fuller (Leaving Before the Rains Come, 2015, etc.), who has written several captivating memoirs about growing up in Africa as well as a biography, of sorts, about the short life of a cowboy, makes her fiction debut with a story set on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Now living in Wyoming, Fuller visited the reservation in 2011 to witness the annual commemoration of the murder of Crazy Horse, where she felt an "unexpected homecoming." In short chapters and spare language, Fuller spins a narrative that reads like a parable about two markedly different cousins, born within a month of each other: the contemplative Rick Overlooking Horse, "a child, and then a man, of shockingly few words"; and the volatile You Choose Watson, "half Cowboy, half Indian," and all trouble. Severely burned by friendly fire when he was in the Army, Rick Overlooking Horse (as in a fairy tale, Fuller always refers to him by his full name) returned home and moved far out in the desert, refusing his military pension or disability allowance, which he called "the diseased currency of the White Man." Eking out a living selling herbal medicine, he earned a reputation as a sage. When people came to him "with their wounded hearts and curdled souls," he gently guided them "out of all the noisy unbecoming we do between birth and death." Rick Overlooking Horse did not become the Lakota Oglala's shaman or chief: he "simply became." You Choose, though, boiled with anger: "it was as if everything that had happened to him--or failed to happen to him--turned toxic in his brain, flooded his veins with urgency." Not surprisingly, he ends up in prison. Twins orphaned at birth; You Choose's unexpected release from jail; a protest siege; and a death propel a plot that gets overly complicated at the end. But Fuller is interested less in events than kinship ("rocks are grandfathers, plants are nations"), forgiveness, and "mild spiritual epiphanies." A tender, wry homage to Native American wisdom and lore.

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January 1, 2017
The author of the beloved memoirs begun with Don't Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight presents her first novel, set on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. In the 1940s, with anger growing over the past and present injustices, Native American cousins Rick Overlooking Horse and You Choose Watson find their paths diverging.

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