Apple: Skin to the Core (audiobook)

 

My Thoughts:

This audiobook, read by the author, Eric Gansworth, is a memoir of radical honesty. The author writes about his growing all the stereotypes and trauma of the indigenous people as a whole, but told from within his own story and coming of age within this environment.

His stories are heartbreaking and honest, but when he starts reciting his rhyming poetry, it diminished the power of his prose. I was all in until then. Three stars for the audiobook and an extra star for being an indigenous author telling an indigenous story.

From the Publisher:

The term Apple is a slur in Native communities across the country. It's for someone supposedly red on the outside, white on the inside.

Eric Gansworth is telling his story in Apple (Skin to the Core). The story of his family, of Onondaga among Tuscaroras, of Native folks everywhere. From the horrible legacy of the government boarding schools, to a boy watching his siblings leave and return and leave again, to a young man fighting to be an artist who balances multiple worlds.

Eric shatters that slur and reclaims it in verse and prose and imagery that truly lives up to the word heartbreaking.

Publication Information:

Author/Narrator: Eric Gansworth

Audio Publisher: Dreamscape Media LLC (Oct 6 2020)