Half Native and half White, seventeen-year-old Trent doesn’t understand his native language, Hitchiti, nor how to play stickball. He did not go through a naming ceremony and receive an Indian name from his Miccosukee tribe in Florida. As he tries to figure out where he belongs, he drinks to turn down the volume in his brain and to escape the dark energy that he allows to identify himself. School has become meaningless to him—more a place for robotic behavior. Like a metaphor for his life, his skateboard deck is chipped and the bearings caked with dirt. Even blasting tunes on his Gibson guitar stops working to numb his pain.
When he gets kicked out of his prestigious private school and his father is released after ten years in prison, Trent’s mother sends him to the reservation. Here, Trent meets Michelle, whose sex appeal elevates his self-esteem until she cheats on him. Unaware of his life story, some of his friends think he is pretending to be Indian, so he worries that his life is a joke, “the punch line to a cartoon. “ (147). Desperate to survive among the chickee huts, living with an abusive father and trying to establish himself in a new school, Trent joins the filmmaking class where he encounters Pippa, his childhood friend and former neighbor. Now she is just his style, way smart “and just a little off” (63). Pippa—whom he calls Homeslice—attempts to quiet the pessimism in his head, to make him realize he is more than good enough.
Although others have faith in him, Trent has to find it himself. As he grows under author Crissa-Jean Chappell’s pen in more than good enough, he comes to understand that all families are weird, that memories get mixed up with the truth, and that real life can let us down.
- Posted by Donna