Sixteen-year-old N\u00f3pika \u201cNokes\u201d Lasley is 6 feet, 2 inches tall and aspires to play hockey in the Olympics. Her mother, who died when Nokes was 5, was \u201ca mix of Native American and First Nations descent,\u201d but her white father has raised her apart from her mother\u2019s relatives, insisting that she embrace whiteness. When her father, who struggles with alcohol abuse, is arrested for murder, Nokes is sent into the foster care system, where she learns that people aren\u2019t always what they seem. Nokes runs away to the home of Luke Janner, a family friend in Minnesota who coaches a university-level women\u2019s hockey team: \u201cI needed a savior, and he was all I had.\u201d But when things don\u2019t go as planned, she wrestles with choices about confronting her past and her mother\u2019s community. Van Brunt, whose father was an enrolled member of the Colville Tribe, has written a fast-paced novel that moves back and forth in time, gradually revealing what Nokes is running from. Although at times the language is clunky, and the interior monologue doesn\u2019t feel authentic to the teenage voice, the technical hockey writing is strong, and the story excels in character development.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sixteen-year-old N\u00f3pika \u201cNokes\u201d Lasley is 6 feet, 2 inches tall and aspires to play hockey in the Olympics. Her mother, who died when Nokes was 5, was \u201ca mix of Native American and First Nations descent,\u201d but her white father has raised her apart from her mother\u2019s relatives, insisting that she embrace whiteness. When her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":7297,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7296"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7296\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}