Title: Scavenger
First published: 1997
Description: Scavenger is a first novel by Dennison Smith about cravings and the desire to fly. The narrator is a young girl of Irish descent growing up in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona, in the late 1970s with a swimming pool, a drunken mother, and a father who stands absently in every door frame, and speaks only through his music. At 13 she runs away from home and eventually comes to live with a Navajo woman on a reservation, where she is submerged in the stories, culture and spiritualism of Native America.

It is a beautiful and often harsh story, which also contrasts the absurdities and disparities of the materially affluent lifestyle of suburban America with the third-world conditions on the - spiritually rich - Indian reservation.
Subjects: Fiction, Irish American families, Girls, Navajo philosophy, General, FICTION
Places: Arizona
LC classification: PS3569.M525 S23 1997