Nora Pierce

Co-sponsored by HUNAP, Harvard University Native American Program.

In Pierce’s forceful debut, Alice is five when she and her homeless, mentally ill mother, Amalie (Mami, she calls her), arrive at Papi’s trailer in an Arizona Indian reservation to live. Papi, a heavy-drinking itinerant laborer, may or may not be Alice’s father, but he adores Amalie (who is of Kwytz’an descent) and has been waiting for her to return after years of medication and hospitalization-related absence. Afflicted with a skin ailment and subsisting largely on French fries, Alice briefly attends the local reservation school before her mother’s visions and paranoia prompt them to hitchhike back to Amalie’s father’s home in California. Amalie’s mental condition worsens, along with Grampa’s untreated diabetes: one, then the other is hospitalized, leaving Alice in foster care. At 13, Alice wants to fit in with her white American foster family and at the school she attends; but while foster sister Anne takes ballet classes, Alice is encouraged to learn bead-making and Indian dances. Yet the pull of her heritage is strong, and Alice and other Quechen (or Native) characters Pierce introduces grapple to overcome difficult legacies in this unsentimental coming-of-age story.

“Nora Pierce’s debut novel, The Insufficiency of Maps, explores the textures and mysteries of the fundamental human experiences — love, dependence, marginality, madness—in a poetic style which does not seek to simply explicate those textures and mysteries, but embodies them.”

— Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander

“Nora Pierce will write many great books that will sell increasing numbers of copies. Trust me on this. She’s gonna be a Wonder Woman.”

— Sherman Alexie, author of The Toughest Indian in the World

“The Insufficiency of Maps is an engaging, profound, and illuminating story. Enormous accomplishments.”

— John L’Heureux, former editor of The Atlantic Monthly, author of sixteen books of poetry and fiction