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    The Insufficiency of Maps: A Novel
    The Insufficiency of Maps: A Novel
    The Insufficiency of Maps: A Novel
    Ebook182 pages2 hours

    The Insufficiency of Maps: A Novel

    By Nora Pierce

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    In this powerful debut novel by award-winning Nora Pierce, a young girl must discover the meaning of self and family as she struggles to find her place between two contrasting realities.

    On the reservation, Alice lives in a run-down trailer. Both her parents are alcoholics. She seldom has enough food and she rarely attends school, but she is free to follow her imagination. She is connected to the life and ancestry of her people and the deep love she receives from her family and community.

    When her mother succumbs to schizophrenia, Alice is removed from her home and placed with a white foster family in the suburbs. This new world is neat and tidy and wholesome, but it is also alien, and Alice is unmoored from everything she has ever known and everything that has defined her.

    As she traces Alice's journey between two cultures, Pierce asks probing questions about identity and difference, and she articulates vital truths about the contemporary Native American experience. Utterly authentic and lyrically compelling, this novel establishes Pierce as an important voice in American literature.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAtria Books
    Release dateApr 17, 2007
    ISBN9781416539414
    The Insufficiency of Maps: A Novel
    Author

    Nora Pierce

    Nora Pierce teaches creative writing at Stanford University, where she was also a Wallace Stegner fellow. An award-winning writer, she was a Rosenthal Fellow in the PEN Center Emerging Voices program. She lives in California.

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    Reviews for The Insufficiency of Maps

    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      I must agree with the review of MsBaba below. I was intrigued and spell-bound by the child's perspective of poverty, malnutrition, neglect, and alienation from mainstream culture in the first parts of the book. However, when she became part of the foster care system, Alice's "voice" lost something. The latter story line didn't ring true or authentic somehow. Nonetheless, I applaud Pierce for this look at the Native American subculture and its effect on children of alcoholics or the mentally ill.
    • 5/5
      Pierce's finesse in relaying the landscape of a child's life through the delicate filter of her young perspective is brilliant. It's terribly challenging to write a child's first person point of view in an adult work, and Pierce accomplishes it masterfully. Through this naive lens the author gives tremendous insight into cultural wealth and poverty, mental illness and the soaring imagination inextricably tied to it, as well as the emotional hurdles of a child displaced by virtually everyone. What stability little Alice lacks in family and tribe Pierce returns to her tenfold with a compassionate and responsive audience.
    • 3/5
      The Insufficiency of Maps by Nora Pierce is a compelling but flawed story concerning an endearing, imaginative, and confused child struggling against adversity. The story begins with Alice, a five-year old Native American girl telling us about the bus trip she is taking with her mother. They are taking an exhausting, exciting journey so her mother can be married. They end up in an impoverished Indian reservation in Arizona where Alice is introduced to a man who may be her “Papi.” The next two-thirds of the book covers a few short months in the child’s life. The reader learns everything through the quiet, all-observing, eyes-wide-open voice of vulnerable little five-year old Alice. We can’t help but fall in love with this child! Through the child’s inexperienced young voice, the reader is able to recognize what the child cannot. While she gets to know her Papi, plays around his dilapidated trailer, makes friends, goes to school, and later goes with her mother to live with her grandfather in Los Angeles, we are consumed by fear. We cannot put this book down, so fearful are we for the young child at every turn. We see Alice exposed to poverty, endangered by malnutrition, and victimized by neglect. Her caregivers are absent, alcoholic, or mentally or physically ill. They all love her, but are incapable of fulfilling her most basic needs. It is heart-wrenching and utterly compelling.In the last third of the book, Alice becomes orphaned, and is taken into the foster care system. She begins living with a family in the white suburbs of Los Angeles. Alice seems lost in this completely alien culture. Trying to find her way, she becomes obsessed with maps. In a succession of brief chapters, Alice grows up. During this period, we see Alice only through quick glimpses—a series of sketches, nothing full enough to reimagine clearly how the child is changing. All too quickly we are at the end of the novel. Alice is suddenly 14, and she is finally able to put some important thing in perspective and take matters into her own hands. The novel ends with an unexpected and satisfying coming-of-age experience that puts Alice squarely on the path toward self-realization.Pierce’s prose is elegant, literary, spare, and lyrical. The dialogue is excellent. Overall, I was pleased and impressed. In particular, the author successfully transports the reader into life on a modern-day Indian reservation, and exposes us clearly to the disabling upheaval of foster care. I look forward to reading more by this talented author; however, I have mixed feelings for this work as a whole. For the first two thirds I was absolutely enthralled; I could not stop reading; I was completely captivated and compelled. But at the point where Alice is transferred into foster care, the book abruptly changes pace and voice. Alice seems to have the very life drained from her. As a reader, I could no longer imagine Alice or believe in her as a middle-schooler, preteen, or adolescent. Thus the overall three-star rating on a book that might easily have earned five stars.
    • 4/5
      Very enjoyable story. Its told from the view point of Alice starting at age 5 until the age of 14. The story follows the life of Alice as her mother suffers from mental illness and comes to killing her. Then the years spent in the foster care system. Excellent first novel for Ms. Pierce.

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    The Insufficiency of Maps - Nora Pierce

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