Calling For a Blanket Dance
- Angela Roloson
- Jan 26, 2024
- 2 min read
A moving and deeply engaging debut novel about a young Native American man struggling to find strength in his familial identity, from a stellar new voice in literary fiction.
Told in a series of voices, Calling for a Blanket Dance takes us into the life of Ever Geimausaddle through the multigenerational perspectives of his family as they soldier through a myriad of difficulties: his father's sudden kidney failure and subsequent disability, his mother's struggle to hold on to her job and care for her husband, the constant resettlement of the family, and Ever's own bottled-up rage at the instability all around him. Meanwhile, all of Ever's relatives have ideas about who he is and who he should be. His Cherokee grandmother urges the family to move across the state to find security; his dying grandfather hopes to reunite him with his heritage through traditional gourd dances; his Kiowa cousin reminds him that he's connected to an ancestral past. And once an adult, Ever must take the strength given to him by his relatives to save not only himself, but also the next generation of family.
How will this young man visualize a place for himself when the world hasn't given him a place to start with? Honest, heartbreaking, and ultimately uplifting, Calling for a Blanket Dance is the story of how Ever Geimausaddle found his way to home.
Genre - Literary Fiction
272 pages, Hardcover
First published July 26, 2022
Literary Awards
Los Angeles Times Book Prize
Nominee for Art Seidenbaum Award (2022),
Average Rating
Goodreads - 4.27
Amazon - 4.3
Storygraph - 4.29
My Verdict
In his debut novel, Hokeah tells the story of Ever Geimausaddle from his difficult infancy to his even more difficult adolescence to his adult life as a down-on-his-luck hero able to work two jobs and raise four kids on the wrong side of the tracks. He tells this story over the course of almost four decades (1976 to 2013) and twelve perspectives. In the end it is an intergenerational chronicle of a Native American family. The novel is rich in themes of gift-giving, second chances, reclaiming culture, family loyalty, and the search for a home.
The characters were well-developed and the story was compelling. I give this one 4.5 stars.
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