Starred Review for Kirkus Reviews

Signs and wonders animate a Cherokee tale of family and community abiding through trauma.Stories are "like medicine, but without the bad taste," says Wyatt, a 12-year-old Cherokee boy in foster care who is preternaturally gifted in telling them. He spins mesmerizing, ambiguous fables about snakes and birds and an underworld, called the Darkening Land, for children at a shelter in rural Oklahoma. Wyatt, whose father is in jail and mother is in the wind, is spending a few days with Maria and Ernest Echota, the only Cherokee placement available. Fifteen years earlier, a White policeman shot and killed the couple's middle child, Ray-Ray, outside a mall. Now Wyatt's quirks and buoyant impersonations startle the Echotas by echoing those of Ray-Ray. More remarkably, the presence of this child appears to draw Ernest back from the fog of Alzheimer's. Maria, her surviving son, Edgar, and daughter, Sonja, all take turns narrating. So does Tsala, a mysterious figure who declares, "We are speakers of the dead, the drifters and messengers….We are always restless, carrying the dreams of children and the elderly, the tired and sick, the poor, the wounded. The removed." The talented Hobson conjures both the Trail of Tears and family fracturing, as he did in Where the Dead Sit Talking (2018), a finalist for the National Book Award. The traumas of forced removal and Ray-Ray's killing twine in Maria's depression, Edgar's meth use, and Sonja's drifting detachment. "I used to stare out the window, envying trees," she says. "This became a regular pattern of thought for me...that I stared at a tree outside and envied its anonymity, its beauty and silence....A tree could stand over a hundred years and remain authentic." Edgar, in his own Darkening Land, fights a treacherous fellow named Jackson Andrews, an evocation of Andrew Jackson. Each of the Echotas gropes toward their annual family bonfire commemorating Ray-Ray on the Cherokee National Holiday. Spare, strange, bird-haunted, and mediated by grief, the novel defies its own bleakness as its calls forth a delicate and monumental endurance.A slim yet wise novel boils profound questions down to its final word: "Home."

Kirkus Reviews (Fri Oct 04 00:00:00 CDT 2024)

Signs and wonders animate a Cherokee tale of family and community abiding through trauma.Stories are "like medicine, but without the bad taste," says Wyatt, a 12-year-old Cherokee boy in foster care who is preternaturally gifted in telling them. He spins mesmerizing, ambiguous fables about snakes and birds and an underworld, called the Darkening Land, for children at a shelter in rural Oklahoma. Wyatt, whose father is in jail and mother is in the wind, is spending a few days with Maria and Ernest Echota, the only Cherokee placement available. Fifteen years earlier, a White policeman shot and killed the couple's middle child, Ray-Ray, outside a mall. Now Wyatt's quirks and buoyant impersonations startle the Echotas by echoing those of Ray-Ray. More remarkably, the presence of this child appears to draw Ernest back from the fog of Alzheimer's. Maria, her surviving son, Edgar, and daughter, Sonja, all take turns narrating. So does Tsala, a mysterious figure who declares, "We are speakers of the dead, the drifters and messengers….We are always restless, carrying the dreams of children and the elderly, the tired and sick, the poor, the wounded. The removed." The talented Hobson conjures both the Trail of Tears and family fracturing, as he did in Where the Dead Sit Talking (2018), a finalist for the National Book Award. The traumas of forced removal and Ray-Ray's killing twine in Maria's depression, Edgar's meth use, and Sonja's drifting detachment. "I used to stare out the window, envying trees," she says. "This became a regular pattern of thought for me...that I stared at a tree outside and envied its anonymity, its beauty and silence....A tree could stand over a hundred years and remain authentic." Edgar, in his own Darkening Land, fights a treacherous fellow named Jackson Andrews, an evocation of Andrew Jackson. Each of the Echotas gropes toward their annual family bonfire commemorating Ray-Ray on the Cherokee National Holiday. Spare, strange, bird-haunted, and mediated by grief, the novel defies its own bleakness as its calls forth a delicate and monumental endurance.A slim yet wise novel boils profound questions down to its final word: "Home."

Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

National Book Award-finalist Hobson (Where the Dead Sit Talking) depicts a Cherokee family-s grief and resilience 15 years after a police officer unjustly kills one of the family-s three children in Quah, Okla. Maria Echota, a retired social worker in her 70s, battles depression and watches as her adult children struggle and her husband, Ernest, develops Alzheimer-s. Their oldest, 31-year-old Sonja, works at Quah-s public library, and they fear she-s taken an unhealthy fixation on Vin Hoff, a younger white man. Edgar, the youngest, lives in Albuquerque and is addicted to meth. The family-s plan to reunite for an annual bonfire to celebrate Cherokee independence in Quah-an event always shaped for them by memories of Ray Ray, who was killed the same day at 15 after a cop wrongly believed Ray Ray had shot a gun-are complicated when Edgar won-t answer the phone. Instead, he-s taken a train to the mysterious Darkening Land, where the spirits of David Foster Wallace and Jimi Hendrix appear, leaving the reader to wonder if Edgar has died as well. There-s hope, though, as Maria and Ernest-s foster child, Wyatt, stimulates Ernest-s decaying mind, reminding him of Ray-Ray-and Sonja-s obsession with Vin turns out to be part of a wonderfully twisted plan to heal her grief. The alternating first-person narration is punctuated by the powerful voice of Tsala, a family ancestor who died before he was forced onto the Trail of Tears. Hobson is a master storyteller and illustrates in gently poetic prose how for many Native Americans the line between this world and the next isn-t so sharp. This will stay long in readers- minds. (Feb.)