(2) YA 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.

Reviewer: | Horn Book Magazine Issue: January, 2023

(2) YA Gansworth, an enrolled member of the Onondaga Nation, grew up on the Tuscarora reservation, making him always "the outsider inside." The theme of being an outsider appears frequently in this memoir in verse. So does the complicated legacy of Indian boarding schools, which three of his grandparents attended, and the slur "Apple," meaning "red on the outside, white on the inside" (based in assumptions that the author challenges). Gansworth's first-person narrative tells a deeply personal story, full of family history and references to popular culture. As in his novel If I Ever Get Out of Here (rev. 9/13), the music of the Beatles is central, with section titles alluding to the band's history and Abbey Road songs providing poem titles within one section. The full pages of mostly long-lined, sometimes dense verse (including some prose poems) are occasionally relieved by Gansworth's gouache illustrations, featuring a complex interplay of images from popular culture and traditional wampum belts documenting and celebrating "survival and cultural continuity," and by photographs gathered from various sources. This introspective memoir confirms by its very existence that, though the boarding schools tried to erase Indian culture, Native peoples "are still / here, / still standing, still walking, one resilient step at a time." Back matter includes further information about the author's poetry and art and explains musical connections.

Reviewer: Dean Schneider | Horn Book Magazine Issue: November, 2020

(2) YA In this rich, honest companion novel to If I Ever Get Out of Here, seventeen-year-old Carson and fifteen-year-old Maggi prepare for a high-stakes Battle of the Bands. Their alternating first-person narratives, set in 1980 on the Tuscarora Indian Nation near Niagara Falls, offer an intimate look at the teens' lives within their Indigenous culture, which embraces modern popular culture but still often faces outsiders' abuse.

Reviewer: Dean Schneider | Horn Book Magazine Issue: May, 2018

(2) YA Lewis Blake, from the Tuscarora Indian Reservation in 1970s upstate New York, is beginning seventh grade at a mostly white junior high, and he's tired of not fitting in. A friendship with newcomer George helps Lewis cope with loneliness and bullying. But does it constitute a betrayal of his world? An engaging, authentic story with depth and heart.

Reviewer: Dean Schneider | Horn Book Magazine Issue: September, 2013