Fabiana Lopez: Absolutely Amazing Diary of Adolescence

     What I enjoyed most about The Absolutely True Diary of A Part-Time Indian was that Arnold felt like a real teenage boy. The voice that Sherman Alexie gave him made him sound authentic and relatable. I also liked how Alexie addressed the issues that a minority student faces in a predominately white high school. He wasn't apologetic about depicting various ways that people are racist, whether they intend to be or not.      There were moments like where Roger said that horrible joke but there were subtler mentions of racism too.

Arnold addresses white privilege especially when he talks about how a lot of his friends at Reardan do have their own issues but they aren't faced with death on a regular basis which is something Junior, living on a reservation and being around alcoholism, having to walk miles back and forward to school is faced with. I also liked the part with Ted, the guy who clearly just wanted to be 'special' by giving this dancer's costume back to someone. I love Junior's drawing of him. Ted is a perfect example of somebody with a 'white savior' complex as well as cultural appropriation.

     The way that Sherman Alexie used humor to deal with these really tough issues made the book so enjoyable and I think the end has a greater impact than it would have if the story was told in a completely serious tone. I cared about Rowdy and Arnold and I wanted them to grow up and succeed in life and be happy.

     I would really have liked to see more about Mary, Arnold's sister. I think he just mentioned her in passing. I thought it was weird, her running off with that guy. I felt like she was too smart for that? But I think she's adventurous, probably because she's desperate to leave the reservation. I feel like her death would have had more impact if we actually saw Mary interact with Arnold at some point. Her death is this horribly painful experience for him but we don't really have any 'establishing moments' with him and his sister.

     I have two personal connections with the story. The first is that I was a minority growing up in SC. Most of my other classmates were either black or white but I was “hispanic.” I met few other hipanic students and most of them were Mexican which is a different culture entirely from Uruguayan. I felt like I didn't really fit in with other hispanic students.People often asked me 'where are you from?' and I would say “I'm from SC but my dad is from Uruguay.” After 9/11 somebody said I looked like I was from Afghanistan. Weird!

     I also know what it's like to grow up with parents who are financially struggling. I always had everything I needed but I was one of the kids on free and reduced lunch. My parents were like Arnold's in that they always tried to get me new clothes when they could. We moved a lot when I was a kid. We were kind of 'nomadic.'

     I think Bloomability by Sharon Creech is a good title to relate to Absolutely True Diary because it's about a family that moves around a lot and how that impacts you as a kid. Then the main character, Dinnie, goes to this boarding school run by her uncle and she's surrounded by kids who are privileged, like Arnold is surrounded by privileged white kids at Reardan. So I think the lack of stability at home and the feeling of wanting to fit in with peers who are privileged is kind of similar in Absolutely True Diary and Bloomability.

     I think this is an excellent depiction of adolescence. Personally I never really got into fights but I'm sure if you get picked on to the extent Junior does and your best friend is like Rowdy then yeah you'd be in a lot of fights too. I can understand wanting to be tough or needing to feel tough around other kids because you're vulnerable or you stand out somehow and Alexie does well positing Junior as a social outcast in more ways than one. Not only does Junior have speech impediments but his physical appearance is strange so he gets picked on by other members of his tribe, even adults. He also experiences difference by wanting to leave the reservation life behind so his tribe scorns him for that, like the booing at the basketball game and them chanting “Ar-nold sucks!”

     That is one of the major themes of adolescent literature; isolation versus peer acceptance and the importance of fitting in. Junior emotionally suffers when he feels ignored by his classmates at Reardan, before he starts dating Penelope.

     Junior has his own flaws, as a teenage boy, of course. He's believable because he isn't sympathetic at first about Penelope's bulimia. Later he assumes that she won't kiss him after the winter formal because she's discovered that he's poor and he thinks she's 'shallow': “I'd been thinking about her breasts and she was thinking about my whole life. I was the shallow one.” Junior shows a lot of growth, character development, in a believable way. He learns from people around him and even grows to admire his sister: “But I thought we were being warriors, you know? And a warrior isn't afraid of confrontation.”

     Alexie describes the issue of existential angst during the teen years really well. Mary struggles to find some kind of purpose after high school and spends all of her time reading romance novels. I think that's a struggle that a lot of teenagers have because they're expected to formulate some kind of 'plan' for this inevitable future but they're still trying to figure out who they are and what the world is really like. In high school it's easy to have all these hopes and dreams about the future but when you graduate you're faced with the reality of having to start small like with a part time job so it can be very disillusioning.