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.

Alma Cuervo narrates this complex story of two Lakota Oglala Sioux cousins with quiet intensity. Rick Overlooking Horse and You Choose Watson wrestle with the despair common to contemporary Native Americans, especially the conflict between Native tradition and non-Native expectations. As Rick raises two orphaned twin boys on the reservation, Cuervo fully captures his lyrical explanations of the natural world. In portraying You Choose, she stoically recounts his miserable struggles and simmering anger, which ultimately boils over into violence. While Cuervo reads the dialogue with limited characterization, the tender precision of her enunciation illuminates the author's graceful prose. Cuervo's delivery allows the listener to consider the fragile ways all people, past and present, are connected. N.M.C. � AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine