Night of the Living Rez

Powerful collection of stories, weaving in and out of time and families living on the Penobscot Nation's reservation. I found the nonlinearity compelling, one that added a lot of intrigue and emotional depth, but for some reason I wasn't as drawn into this set of stories as I felt I should have been. I'm not sure where the disconnect was, other than the prose was great but not the most beautiful prose I'd ever read. 

Compelling all the same.

Night of the Living Rez is marketed in a lot of places as a collection of short stories which it is but not in the anthology way, it's short stories in the sense that it is slices of life going back and forth in time which at the end completes the overarching life story of the protagonist.
This book felt both unique and familiar, it speaks of the type of brokenness that is passed down from one generation to another and of the banal and grandiose ways in which it happens in a very human way which I think is so important these days.

This is a collection of short stories about incidents in the life of one character on a reservation in Maine throughout his life. Some of the stories were better than others (the stories about the friends messing around kind of blended together for me, but the titular story was incredible) and they're told out of chronological order for a reason I couldn't really grasp aside from putting the best story at the end.

Though this is said to be a story collection, it reads much more like a novel. Told in an episodic fashion, every “story” is a short, almost slice of life segment in the life of Dee, and his Penobscot community in Maine. We are given snippets of his childhood and adulthood non-linearly, which means the reader always questions how and why adult Dee ended up in the position he is in. This book deals with lots of issues; family problems, drugs, alcohol, grief, loss and native tradition, and Morgan Talty switches from laughter to heartbreak with flair and ease. That's life, I suppose.

Recommended, especially to people who enjoyed Tommy Orange's “There, There”.