THE MISSING MORNINGSTAR

A collection of stories that examine coming of age, family, and Diné life.

The book opens with "Dormant," in which 17-year-old Bernadine becomes involved in a relationship with 24-year-old Aaron after helping him rescue an abandoned kitten. Bernadine considers her mother’s choice in men who are always “jailbirds” and what her future might look like with Aaron, a white man. “Interracial couples always had a hard time on the reservation, especially when the woman was Navajo,” she notes. This theme of the expectations imposed on Navajo women recurs several times; the stories look closely at the connections between self and community and also provide a view of reservation life and traditions. In "The Casket in the Backseat," a man gets a ride from a hearse and discovers his grandfather’s spirit is trapped in the casket. In "Snow Bath Season," a dead mother speaks to her daughter through Amazon’s Alexa. In the title story, a teen witnesses the disappearance of Miss Northwestern Arizona. These ingenious tales are rangy in their scope and form. “Under the Porchway” is notable for the way it interweaves plot with instructions for how to butcher a sheep. The author's sharp prose is amplified by extraordinary similes such as “roots clenched into the earth like wiry brown fists” and “veins clung in clusters beneath the skin of their hands like turquoise squash blossoms.” Not only are the metaphors and similes surprising, but the turns within each story are as well. Just when it feels like a plot might move into a familiar trope, it upends itself in the best way. The stories don’t provide tidy resolutions, but they reveal essential truths about the continued effects of colonization on Indigenous people, including the lack of resources on tribal lands, ongoing mental health and substance abuse crises, violence against women, and Indigenous women going missing.

Propulsive and complex, this is a gorgeously written debut.