From National Book Award finalist Brandon Hobson, a kaleidoscopic middle-grade adventure that mixes the anxieties, friendships, and wonders of a Cherokee boy's life with Cherokee history and lore.Ziggy has ANXIETY. Partly this is because of the way his mind works, and how overwhelmed he can get when other people (especially his classmate Alice) are in the room. And partly it's because his mother disappeared when he was very young, making her one of many Native women who've gone mysteriously missing. Ziggy and his sister, Moon, want answers, but nobody around can give them.Once Ziggy gets it in his head that clues to his mother's disappearance may be found in a nearby cave, there's no stopping him from going there. Along with Moon, Alice, and his best friend, Corso, he sets out on a mind-bending adventure where he'll discover his story is tied to all the stories of the Cherokees that have come before him.Ziggy might not have any control over...

"Brandon Hobson has given us a haunted work, full of voices old and new. It is about a family's reckoning with loss and injustice, and it is about a people trying for the same. The journey of this family's way home is full—in equal measure—of melancholy and love. The Removed is spirited, droll, and as quietly devastating as rain lifting from earth to sky."—Tommy Orange, author of There ThereA RECOMMENDED BOOK FROMUSA Today * O, the Oprah Magazine * AARP * Alma * Biblio Lifestyle * Publishers WeeklySteeped in Cherokee myths and history, a novel about a fractured family reckoning with the tragic death of their son long ago—from National Book Award finalist Brandon HobsonIn the fifteen years since their teenage son, Ray-Ray, was killed in a police shooting, the Echota family has been suspended in private grief. The mother, Maria,...

Set in rural Oklahoma during the late 1980s, Where the Dead Sit Talking is a startling, authentically-voiced and lyrically-written Native American coming-of-age storyWith his single mother in jail, Sequoyah, a fifteen-year-old Cherokee boy, is placed in foster care with the Troutt family. Literally and figuratively scarred by his unstable upbringing, Sequoyah has spent years mostly keeping to himself, living with his emotions pressed deep below the surface—that is, until he meets seventeen-year-old Rosemary, another youth staying with the Troutts. Sequoyah and Rosemary bond over their shared Native American background and tumultuous paths through the foster care system, but as Sequoyah's feelings towards Rosemary deepen, the precariousness of their lives and the scars of their pasts threaten to undo them both.