近距离内射合集

There is a particular kind of frustration that comes with being 51 years old and reading a work of fiction that should have existed when you were a kid.

I grew up in New Mexico. I grew up with Pueblo communities all around me. And I did not know.

I did not know what had been suffered by the people whose land I was growing up on, because no one told me.

My education was so whitewashed that the Trail of Tears got exactly one paragraph before we moved on to celebrating the Spanish conquistadors. That is not an exaggeration.

Brian Lee Young鈥檚 debut young adult novel, 鈥淪hards of Silence,鈥� made me feel that gap in my education as a physical thing.

Young, an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation and a graduate of Yale and Columbia universities, draws from his own lived experience to tell the story of 15-year-old Derrick Hoskie, a Din茅 teenager from the Navajo reservation in New Mexico who earns a scholarship to an elite East Coast boarding school.

What unfolds is a coming-of-age story that is funny, painful and rooted in reality, following Derrick as he navigates class shock, microaggressions, academic pressure and the particular exhaustion of being the only one in the room who looks like you.

Derrick鈥檚 voice is sharp, contemporary and completely his own. When he observes his classmates can distinguish Puritans from Pilgrims but cannot tell Cherokee from Din茅, the frustration lands with precision. When he says he has never known how to respond when someone tells him being Native is cool, but that it totally is, you understand exactly who this kid is. Young writes teenagers the way teenagers actually think, without flattening them into symbols or lessons.

Woven through Derrick鈥檚 present-day story is something even more tender: the unraveling of his great-grandmother M谩s谩n铆 Mildred鈥檚 silence about her own time in a federal Indian boarding school and what it costs a family to carry that kind of history without language for it.

The novel asks a quietly devastating question: what happens to a people when the philosophy of survival and the damage of colonization become so intertwined that healing requires separating them thread by thread?

Middle and high school classrooms have not always asked that question. They should have been asking it for a very long time.

The book鈥檚 cover art is by Lynnette Haozous, a Din茅 artist celebrated for her vivid creations that embody Indigenous heritage and cultural identity. As a muralist and mixed-media artist, she has made substantial contributions to public art that honors Native American traditions.

It has been only in the last several years that I have begun to truly understand what this country did to Native nations and Native peoples. Books like 鈥淪hards of Silence鈥� are part of the way that education happens, not just for adults catching up on what we were never taught, but for young readers who deserve the full truth of the place they are growing up in.

I am so glad this book exists. I just wish I had it 35 years ago.

Kara Sandoval is the event coordinator and a bookseller at Books on the Bosque, located at 6261 Riverside Plaza Lane, Suite A-2, or at .