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Gansworth, Eric

My Good Man

414 pp. | Levine Querido | November, 2022 | Trade ISBN 978-1-64614-183-8 $21.99
(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

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