The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

I loved this book. It made me laugh and even cry just a little bit. I'm not Native American but I've lived among them at times and as far as I can see it's very close to their current struggles.
The only thing that was hard for me was the language. This book has some pretty bad slang (by my standards anyway) but it's written from the perspective of a teenage boy. And I was a teenage girl not a boy so I don't know if this is really how they think and talk. Anyway the slang was too graphic for me.

Junior has had enough. He's seen enough lives wasted on the reservation, people destroyed by a potent combination of alcohol and hopelessness. Junior makes his move; he leaves the comfort of his reservation school for the white school twenty-two long miles away, a world away from the reservation.

A tough book to read, full of poverty, alcoholism, and, worst of all, the brutal lack of hope. It felt absolutely true. As I read this book, I felt like I did when I was watching the movie, Beowulf, hating the violence, hating the cruelty, yet fully believing the underlying truth of the world, knowing this is the way the world is, wanting to reject it, to fix it, to heal it, and not having the tiniest clue as to how to do so.