review: Touching Spirit Bear

[Nessa]

see it here: http://www.timewastersguide.com/review/1539/Touching-Spirit-Bear

[Fellfrosch]

Spirit Bear, show us on the doll where they touched you.

[stacer]

This book is actually very controversial, especially for Native American children's literature critics. You can find a review here: http://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/2006_09_20_archive.html. I can see their point, but it also seems to me that fewer critics were as troubled by a book like Burned (by the same author as Crank), which is a book about a "Mormon" girl for which the author has never interviewed an actual believing Mormon, and actually never did any research beyond talking to two very anti ex-Mormons. I think the lesson that comes out of this for me is to speak up when books like Burned come out as well as to try to choose better books, but also to try to take each book with a grain of salt--some fiction is more fictional than others. I'm not going to take Pirates of the Carribbean as the quintissential example of actual pirate life in the 18th century, either.