Jonny Appleseed

(Paperback)

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"You're gonna need a rock and a whole lotta medicine" is a mantra that Jonny Appleseed, a young Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer, repeats to himself in this vivid and utterly compelling debut novel by poet Joshua Whitehead.

Off the reserve and trying to find ways to live and love in the big city, Jonny becomes a cybersex worker who fetishizes himself in order to make a living. Self-ordained as an NDN glitter princess, Jonny has one week before he must return to the "rez"and his former lifeto attend the funeral of his stepfather. The seven days that follow are like a fevered dream: stories of love, trauma, sex, kinship, ambition, and the heartbreaking recollection of his beloved kokum (grandmother). Jonny's life is a series of breakages, appendages, and linkagesand as he goes through the motions of preparing to return home, he learns how to put together the pieces of his life.

Jonny Appleseed is a unique, shattering vision of Indigenous life, full of grit, glitter, and dreams.

Reviews

With only seven days until he returns home for his stepfather's funeral, Appleseed spends a pyretic week attempting to reconcile the competing factions of his life: sex, friends, work, sex, family, identity, sex. Throughout, memories of his kokum (grandmother) intrude upon the chaos, and these unexpected moments of remembrance prove most striking. A radically original new voice. --Booklist

If we're lucky, we'll find one or two books in a lifetime that change the language of story, that manage to illuminate new curves in the flat vessels of old letters and words. This is one of those books. --Cherie Dimaline, author of The Marrow Thieves

Unflinching and intimate, Joshua Whitehead takes his readers on a journey to the heart of an NDN glitter princess with generous, swooning prose. Unforgettable. --Eden Robinson, author of Son of a Trickster

Author Bio

Joshua Whitehead is an Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer member of Peguis First Nation. He is the author of full-metal indigiqueer (Talonbooks, 2017) and the 2016 winner of the Aboriginal Arts and Stories Challenge which awarded him a Governor General's History Award. Currently he is undertaking a Ph.D. in Indigenous Literatures and Cultures at the University of Calgary.