A collection of short stories set on a reservation in Alberta. Funny in places and desperately sad in others. My favourite was the first story Illianna Comes Home. ( )

Dance Me Outside is an excellent collection. All the stories are from the perspective of Silas Ermineskin and though I did take umbrage with the syntactical choices of the author (one which the character explains) I did find myself wondering why most all the Cree in this book talked like Silas. This quibble aside there are funny, poignant and some real gut-punches in this one. After a while the camaraderie of Silas, Frank Fence-post and others takes on an almost Steinbeck-esque level of brotherhood and escapades like how they band together to help Annie in the story Penance. Lark Song is one of the strongest in the collection, rendering the brother Joseph who suffered brain-damage when he was young and never gets any older inside his head. The resistance of the community to send Joseph to a care facility combined with the reality of his situation was well handled by Kinsella and it doesn't leave the reader with any definitive answers. I would have liked to have seen more lyricism that popped up in this story and Between. The handling of the American Indian Movement in The Inaugural Meeting seemed boorish at best and there could have, perhaps, been a much better way to highlight the disconnection between the day-to-day life and life of activists without making the CIA seem like benevolent and benign. The majority of these stories do handle the cultural divide between the Cree and farmers in a way that I've experienced and it is well worth a read for anyone looking for a solid short story collection. ( )

Stories of unhappy people. ( )

I like Moccasin Telegraph much better. These stories were just so very bleak. ( )

This book is so hilarious and reminds me of people I know and situations I've been in! Funny and real. The author understates so much that the read-between-the-lines parts show the comedy and tragedy of being a reservation Native as much as what's in the text. I'm reading it again at some point. ( )