ericgaryanderson's review against another edition
5.0
A really beautiful novel about Florida Creek family and tribal love. As a reader I felt honored to get to know these grandparents and grandchildren, these cousins, these mothers and fathers and children who by and large do their best, and these undead ancestors as well as the people who leave, the people who remain, the people who come back home, and all the various Creek ways of seeing and being that Chip Livingston so carefully and lovingly details. If the novel centers on any one member of the family, it's Peter Strongbow, who is gay and (with very few exceptions) completely accepted and (that word again) loved. Peter's boyfriend, the great love of his life, is ill; the novel doesn't call his illness by name for quite some time, and so I won't name it here, but it's one of a number of struggles characters in this novel face and help each other through. Livingston also wonderfully evokes native southern spaces—the tribal grounds, the Indian church, the water, the burial mounds—as well as Florida trees and snakes and owls and old yellow dogs and so much more. This is a major addition to native southern literature.
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