Where the Dead Sit Talking by Brandon Hobson

No matter what, I could not bring myself to think of Rosemary any less. Little by little, the days were like thieves, stealing parts of me, including any courage I had to confront my feelings toward people: my growing interest in Rosemary, my hatred for Nora Drake, my friendship with George. At night I began to think more and more about my mother, as her court hearing grew closer. I worried about her release. I worried about her remaining locked up. And I worried the days were taking my feelings, how the more I thought about everyone, the more dead I felt inside.

Sequoyah is fifteen years old, Cherokee, caught up in the faceless indifference of the foster system. His mother is in prison, perhaps up for parole soon, but in the meantime he's been placed with the Troutts, a well-meaning couple who live out in the sticks of rural Oklahoma. Life with the Troutts, at least, is better than life in juvenile detention, or some of the other foster homes that Sequoyah has been in and out of. He finds a friend in George, another foster kid who prefers to write messages than to speak, and who clearly has some kind of autism. But it's the Troutts' third foster kid, an older girl named Rosemary, who really captivates Sequoyah. Like him, she's Cherokee, she's disaffected, she's not like other kids. "I feel a weird connection to you," she tells him. "I mean like you're a lost soul from a thousand years ago who's here to deliver something to me."

Maybe that sounds heartwarming, or worse, banal, but it's not. What Rosemary and Sequoyah really have in common is that they've both been deeply damaged by troubling childhoods, and they are both strange, dark, and prone to antisocial behavior and violent thoughts. We come to understand that people are actually afraid of Sequoyah; when George wakes up bleeding from his mouth during a bad sleepwalking spell, he assumes that it's Sequoyah that has hit him in his sleep. When Rosemary's girlfriend (perhaps in both senses) Nora tells her that the way Sequoyah looks at Rosemary is creepy, are we sure that she's wrong? Sequoyah's affection for Rosemary is both a desire to be with her and a desire to be her; he sneaks into her room when she's not around and wears her clothes. Rosemary, for her part, steals money and things and disappears for days; she gives and then cruelly retracts her affection for Sequoyah and talks openly of suicide.

What I liked best about Where the Dead Sit Talking, I think, is that Hobson manages to make Sequoyah and Rosemary poignantly empathetic, rather than repulsive or frightening. We see quite easily how they've been shaped by their difficult circumstances; Sequoyah literally bears scars on his face from an episode of his mother's negligence. As teenagers, they feel real; in the afterword, Hobson talks about how the book was inspired by children he knew working in Oklahoma's foster system. In fact, one of my biggest reactions to Where the Dead Sit Talking was jealousy: I've been working on my own book about disaffected teens, and I wish I had Hobson's talent for detail. Time and time again Hobson has Sequoyah, Rosemary, George, or even some rando at their shared school, do or say something that I bookmarked to steal--or, I should say, for inspiration.

Where the Dead Sit Talking is a grim book. It's narrated by a slightly older Sequoyah, looking back at this transformative experience in his life. We know from the beginning that things haven't gotten better for him; the book's first line is "I have been unhappy for many years now." Sometimes he'll interrupt the narrative to let us know how a particular character dies: "on October 12, 1999 of mysterious causes," or, "who later died on January 19, 2003 of strangulation." These asides are never justified or explained; we're not meant to think something as gruesome and manipulative as that Sequoyah has become a serial killer or anything. But he is someone who grew up surrounded by loss and death, who sees death. On a narrative level, Where the Dead Sits Talking avoids overarching narratives in favor of something more vignette-like. When climactic things happen--the one moment of grand violence in the novel is the one moment that feels a little off--they both grow out of and interrupt the persistent ebb and flow of hope and despair that characterize the life of a foster child like Sequoyah.

This is the fourth year in a row that I have dedicated January to reading books by Native American authors, and Where the Dead Sits Talking is one of the most rewarding discoveries from the experience. Sequoyah's Cherokee identity isn't exactly central to the narrative, but neither is it incidental. Looking back, I was struck by his desire to be like his "great-grandfather," who saw spirits in every thing. It's not such a big leap from there to a teenager who yearns for the mystical experience of a soulmate like Rosemary: "My great-grandfather claimed to have met a beautiful spirit woman... Her eyes were fire. She held my great-grandfather's gaze, kissed his hands, and fell into a long, deep sleep with him." Perhaps we are invited to see a connection between the kinds of displacement that the Cherokee suffered and the displacement that kids in the foster system suffer. Maybe not. But at the very least, Hobson reminds us that displacement--alienation, isolation, and loss--have many forms, and each is more enduring than we might hope to believe.