The secret to a good story is good characters. Wait, that’s not true. The secret to a good story is to have a little mystery mixed in with the action, to never tell everything all at once, to keep the reader or the listener guessing so that thaey always want to go to the next page with you. Maybe.

Whatever the secret is, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water has it. The book tells the story of 3 women: Rayona, the grand-daughter, Christine the mother, and Ida the grandmother.  Three generations, each tied to their tribe’s reservation. The compelling thing about the book is that it is told from the first-person perspective, one woman at a time. The first 250 pages are Rayona. The second 150 Christine, and the third 100- Ida.

Rayona is the teenager, essentially an orphan with a father who is never around and a mother who is either sick or flailing or too confused and self-absorbed to be a real mother. That ansd she never had one herself. Rayona’s journey is one of independence and rebellion, with a surprisingly strong core that come s from we don’t know where- which is a theme throughout the book of all the women.

Next is Christine. Some of the story is just about her. Some of it overlaps with what Rayona told us, and you find out the motivations and reasoning for the woman who is now more than a crazed mother. It is here that you realize the strength of Dorris’ character portraits, how distinct he can make each woman.

And now is the time to have the real questions answered- like who is “Aunt Ida?” And why is she so gruff, and silent, and stoic? The final chapter tells her story.

Redemption is a word my English professor used a lot in college. He was all about poems and that was his tag-word. Like he was always looking to see if something was redemptive, or how he could work the word into the blurb he was writing for the back of some other writers’ book. Redemptive. I used to think it meant making things better, like the redemption meant that things were ok, or that they were better now,- fixed. That isn’t what I think anymore. Things in this book and this story are not so much fixed as given context, explained, and absorbed by the  characters who are living them. And they experience the kind of redemption that does not make things better, but gives things meaning.

For a set of women who have lived for most of their lives without each other and not really sure why or what to do with it, watching and hearing them go through a haphazard redemption with questionable resulting metaphors is a truly beautiful story.

Read it and you will not be disappointed. And you may jus wonder what more there is to learn about the family members you don’t know as much as you think you know about.

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