Reservation life is rendered carefully but never romantically in this collection, and the devastating effects of inescapable poverty permeate every page. All of these violent acts and more are just a sampling of the intensity of a life calibrated by generational trauma and an intimate understanding of what it feels like to always expect the next blow, the next slight, the next random act of personal or institutional violence. A police officer robs Victor and his wife during a sham of a traffic stop. When Victor moves off of the reservation and into a Seattle apartment with his white girlfriend, their relationship is plagued by intense verbal conflict and, occasionally, physical violence. A man’s body is ravaged by cancer-his “favorite” tumor is the size of a baseball. Bloody and even fatal car crashes abound throughout the narrative, and more often than not, they’re due to a driver’s intoxication.

An Indian woman is sterilized by her doctor after giving birth to a son. As a teenager, Victor mercilessly beats Thomas Builds-the-Fire, one of his childhood friends and a young man blessed with intricate storytelling abilities. The confusion, anguish, and profound sadness of that violence creates a sense of hopelessness and of futility in the face of it. Alexie uses violence this way to mirror the rippling effects of the pervasive historical violence against Native Americans. Violence is a constant throughout Alexie’s stories-sometimes the violence is tied to motivations such as love and hatred, as is the case with Victor’s uncles’ fistfight, but often the violence is random, or senseless, or due to an ineffable sense of loss and frustration. As Victor watches his uncles Arnold and Adolph fistfight in the middle of an approaching hurricane, he notes how the rise and fall of their violence against one another mirrors the trajectory of the storm-it is unthinking, destructive, and undoubtedly a force of nature.

From the collection’s first story, “Every Little Hurricane,” readers are thrust into a world defined by extreme poverty, casual and tragic violence, and a haunting, pervasive sense of both cultural and personal loss.

The lone ranger tonto