Horn Book Magazine, NPR and School Library Journal also offered favorable reviews. Younger teens looking for the strength to lift themselves out of rough situations would do well to start here.” Booklist

A few of the plotlines fade to gray by the end, but this ultimately affirms the incredible power of best friends to hurt and heal in equal measure. “Alexie’s humor and prose are easygoing and well suited to his young audience, and he doesn’t pull many punches as he levels his eye at stereotypes both warranted and inapt. Publishers Weekly described the YA novel as the “Native American equivalent of Angela’s Ashes, a coming-of-age story so well observed that its very rootedness in one specific culture is also what lends it universality, and so emotionally honest that the humor almost always proves painful.” Other review sources were equally complimentary. The committee recommended adding a “mature” label to copies at the high school library. The district also removed the novel from the library at Derby North Middle School. A 12-member committee reviewed the challenge and decided as of March 2022 to no longer allow teachers to use a set of the novels approved for classrooms. The book was challenged by the grandparent of a ninth-grade student.

One of the more recent challenges took place in Wichita, Kansas, this past year. This book was banned and challenged for profanity, sexual references, and allegations of sexual misconduct by the author. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian was the most-challenged book in the United States from 2010 to 2019 and was named one of the top ten most challenged books in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2017, 2018, and 2020. Cartoons, font changes and dark humor illuminate the serious themes of the book in a way that even the most reluctant readers can connect with and enjoy. He is determined to improve himself and overcome poverty despite the handicaps of birth and race. Throughout the book, Junior struggles with questions about community and identity. Although his parents support his decision, everyone else on the rez sees him as a traitor. Soon after they start freshman year, Junior transfers from a school on the “rez” to one in a small white town, 22 miles away. Fourteen-year-old Arnold, or “Junior” is a cartoonist and book worm with a fiercely protective best friend, Rowdy. The novel features a teenager born with disabilities including encephalitis, who has grown up on a reservation in Spokane, Washington. If number of challenges are a marker of the serious themes of a book, Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is worthy of close attention as one of the top ten most challenged books of all time.

The part time indian