Sherman Alexie grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, in the state of Washington. Alexie is well known for writing about life on the reservation and the challenges that the USA's native population face today. In his work he draws upon his own experiences.

In this novel we meet Arnold Spirit Jr., a fourteen-year-old Native American. Arnold or Junior, as he is often called, is partly based on Alexie’s own experiences. He is the reservation outcast – an outsider – and he is routinely bullied and beaten up. His parents are alcoholics and the family poor. At times, poverty is just terrible and thus Arnold sometimes wishes that he could draw "a fist full of twenty dollar bills, and perform some magic trick and make them real".

Arnold, like Sherman Alexie, makes a choice to leave the reservation and attend the white school 22 miles away in Reardan. Considered a traitor, Arnold is caught between two worlds: his home on the reservation and the white high school he attends.

Read through this vocabulary list before you listen to or read chapter 1:

In Chapter 1, the narrator Arnold Spirit Jr. starts off with what happened at his birth and explains why, according to himself, he is not like everybody else. Here is a link to the first chapter of this novel, called "The Black Eye of the Month Club". You can also listen to the first chapter of the book below.