Where the Dead Sit Talking

Several years after a traumatic experience in 1989 when he was 15, Sequoyah, a young Cherokee man, looks back on his childhood and his upbringing to the time of that incident. Sequoyah is physically and emotionally scarred from being raised by his drug- and alcohol-abusing single mother. When his mother is jailed, he is assigned to a foster home in which he meets 17-year-old Rosemary, another Native American foster child who holds compelling, nearly supernatural powers over Sequoyah. They smoke a lot of cigarettes and some pot, while Rosemary describes her fixation on death. Sequoyah's narrative wanders from the apparently real to the clearly imaginary, with the distinction sometimes becoming unclear. Some characters, such as the third foster child, a social worker, and the male foster parent, a bookie who has stacks of $100 bills stashed in the shed, do not seem to be as psychologically or emotionally well developed as they might be in this emotional, psychological novel. The story is very well read by Eric Michael Summerer.