Quiet Until the Thaw
A Novel
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4.5 • 18 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The debut novel from the bestselling author of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight and Leaving Before the Rains Come.
“Awe inspiring . . . An ardent, original, and beautifully wrought book.” —The New York Times Book Review
Lakota Oglala Sioux Nation, South Dakota.
Two Native American cousins, Rick Overlooking Horse and You Choose Watson, are pitted against each other as their tribe is torn apart by infighting. Rick chooses the path of peace and stays; You Choose, violent and unpredictable, strikes out on his own. When he returns, after three decades behind bars, he disrupts the fragile peace and threatens the lives of the entire reservation.
A complex tale that spans generations and geography, Quiet Until the Thaw conjures, with the implications of an oppressed history, how we are bound not just to immediate family but to all who have come before and will come after us, and, most of all, to the notion that everything was always, and is always, connected.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
