The Devil Is a Southpaw by Brandon Hobson

 

This seemed, in the library, as though it might be an interesting novel about surviving childhood on the Rez, with all the ways the larger American culture tries to destroy the people/s struggling to do so. It was barely about that, and it wasn't really all that interesting. The various sentences, many of them most of a page, were often beautiful as prose, but they mostly said nothing and went nowhere. Also lots of tendencies to drop really obscure words, some of which might have been correct--I only recognized a few, and not all those usages seemed to be so. The novel played various games with unreliable narration and what might have been going on that the narrator didn't want to tell us; I was never interested enough to really care, though some of the lies the narrator was telling were really obvious. The envy at the core of the novel seemed really weak to me, and blown out of any reasonable proportion in the telling. Not a super-awesome novel, in spite of occasionally magnificent sentences.