Crazy Horse's Girlfriend

October 13, 2014
Striving to bring the modern plight of the poverty-stricken Native population to light, Wurth's debut novel brings us a tale that is long on vulgarity but short on that essential sympathetic element. Sixteen-year-old Margaritte, a drug dealer in a run-down Colorado town, has plenty of reasons to hate the world, but her over-reliance on swearing crosses the line from realistic into distracting as she sneaks out to deal drugs and party in abandoned buildings. There is potential for true vulnerability beneath her tough-chick shell, but we are shown little more than what she shows the rest of the world and she becomes little more than a caricature of young wildness and rage. Likewise, her relationships with others, including with her parentsâan abusive alcoholic and his hopeless wifeâare full of missed opportunities for depth and complexity. Margaritte's own casual dismissal of being attacked early on makes it far too easy to likewise dismiss or gloss over the horrors and dangers of extreme poverty and drug culture detailed in the narrative.

July 1, 2014
A Native American adolescent in rural Colorado dreams of a life beyond the weary grind of her small town.Teacher and poet Wurth (Creative Writing/Western Illinois Univ.; Indian Trains, 2007) infuses her debut novel with impassioned teen spirit, but the pedestrian nature of the challenges it presents to its tough narrator leaves something to be desired. Sixteen-year-old Margaritte is Native American on her mother's side, white on her father's, and all kinds of pissed off about her lot in life. Between going to high school, working a drab job as a waitress, selling weed with her cousin Jake, and dealing with her alcoholic father and her mother's denial, the kid has a lot of angst on her plate. She gets quite dreamy when she starts sleeping with a new boyfriend named Mike, a coke-addled jackass who cheats on her with one of her friends. As happens, Margaritte turns up pregnant, which is a bit cliched for a character who gets stabbed in the first chapter during a drug deal. "I want to...I don't know what I want!" shouts Margaritte at her boyfriend. "I don't want to be a teenage mother! Another fucking Indian statistic. I don't want my mother's life." The rest of the story trails out in kind of extreme ways. Margaritte's cousin Jake is arrested when he assaults Mike in the hospital after an overdose. Margaritte is nearly killed when her father drunkenly runs the family into a ditch during an argument. There's supposed to be some will-she-or-won't-she tension over whether Margaritte will have an abortion, which feels like it came straight out of a freshman creative writing class. Margaritte has an interesting voice, and Wurth gives the environment a gritty patina, but there's not enough of an emotional arc to warrant the drama here.An unsentimental but ultimately unconvincing play about an Indian girl navigating the teenage wasteland.

COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

August 1, 2014
Coming-of-age is complicated; ask Margaritte. Desperately anxious to escape a dreary future in her hometown of Idaho Springs, Colorado, the 16-year-old Native American has taken to drug dealing to squirrel away money for a palmier future. Her partner in crime is her cousin and best friend, Jake, who is also Native American. Both teens are enthusiastic users of their product but eschew harder stuff like the cocaine to which Margaritte's new boyfriend, Mike, is addicted. Alcohol is her father's drug of choice; indeed, he is a violently angry alcoholic who has recently threatened his family with a gun. To top it all off, Margaritte has discovered she is pregnant. Mike, the father, begs her to keep the baby, but her mother threatens that if she doesn't abort the fetus, she will throw her out of the house. What to do? The answers, like the situations that prompt them, are often melodramatic. No wonder Margaritte thinks, my life had just somehow come up to the level of a telenovela. True, but the novel is also a compelling and affecting look at the ineluctable awfulness of some teens' lives.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)