My Good Man
by Eric Gansworth; illus. by the author
High School    Levine Querido    414 pp.
11/22    9781646141838    $21.99

Border-crossing is a major theme of Gansworth’s (­Onondaga Nation) complex novel, set on the Tuscarora Reservation. The novel itself also traverses a border: not between the U.S. and Canada but between YA and adult fiction, given its length and density, its twenty-five-year-old main character, and its mature sexual and violent themes. Extended flashbacks, however, focus on protagonist Brian’s (Haudenosaunee) experience growing up in the 1970s and 1980s. Native and non-Native people alike have always looked down on him for being poor and for being a part of a family of medicine people. Now, as he’s learning from the assignments he gets from his biased newspaper editor boss: “Your job is to explore the way you’re different.” In the early-1990s framing narrative, Brian must find out why his close friend—a man who is almost an uncle, though not related by blood—was beaten and left by the side of the road, a mystery connected to a handful of people who live on the reservation. This is fundamentally a story of balancing between cultures and about friendship between men. Fans of the author’s work will notice characters, settings, and themes in common with his award-winning earlier YA titles (most recently Apple: Skin to the Core, rev. 11/20). Gansworth’s black-and-white paintings, based on album cover art for the 1970s and 1980s classic rock band Rush, open each section with symbolic impact; an appended note discusses their role in the story and in the author’s life.

From the January/February 2023 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.