The Lesser Blessed - by Richard Van Camp (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

PEOPLE MAGAZINE'S TOP 10 'ESSENTIAL FICTION, NONFICTION, MEMOIR AND SHORT STORIES BY NATIVE AMERICAN AND INDIGENOUS AUTHORS TO ADD TO YOUR LIST'

The 30th-anniversary edition of the coming-of-age Indigenous cult classic.

Richard Van Camp's internationally acclaimed, bestselling novel about coming of age in Canada's North has become an Indigenous classic and inspired a critically acclaimed film. This special 30th-anniversary edition features a new introduction from the author, as well as two bonus short stories that follow the lives of the novel's main characters.

The Lesser Blessed tracks the exploits of Larry Sole, a Dogrib teenager living in the small Northern town of Fort Simmer. After losing much of his memory in a violent accident, what he loves more than anything is reading, hearing and collecting stories. With no interest in booze or sports, he floats on the edges of high school life, sustained by his love of Iron Maiden and a hopeless passion for school hottie Juliet Hope. When good-looking, trouble-seeking Johnny Beck moves into town, he shakes up Larry's dreamy existence and leads him into a life of sex, drugs and violence, bringing him face to face with memories that he's done his best to lose.

Raw, funny, and unflinching, The Lesser Blessed is a powerful story of adolescence, friendship, desire and survival--and of a young Dogrib man confronting the past as he struggles to find his place in the world.

Review Quotes

"Its halcyon moments are cigarette scorched, and it has teeth--lots of them. The Lesser Blessed stood apart in 1996, and there has yet to be anything like it." --Booklist

"I believe in very few things, yet The Lesser Blessed, as dark as it is bright, is the only book I've ever read that had me thinking a paradise exists." --Morgan Talty, award-winning author of Night of the Living Rez, in People magazine

"Van Camp really shows how to write about youth with trauma, and his book was not only instructive for my own writing but also revelatory in the ways it helped me articulate things I couldn't before--the ways it opened me up to my own past and healed me with the power that is fiction." --Morgan Talty in Shondaland

"The Lesser Blessed is a treasured time capsule, but one that is still relevant and familiar today. Few elements have changed in Canada's North. It's rough, raw and real. It's about finding ground and losing ground, reaching for a lost language and finding a new one that sometimes only love and ravens understand." --Vancouver Sun

"...the writing is in places startingly original, and the story completely compelling...This novel, like all challenging fiction, is filled with awful, unavoidable truth." --Quill & Quire

"In this powerful and very funny debut novel, author Richard Van Camp gives us one of the most original teenage characters in Canadian fiction...This 20th anniversary edition of a true Canadian literary classic from Douglas & McIntyre is unreservedly recommended." --Midwest Book Review

"Van Camp doesn't turn away from the experiences high school kids have with drugs, sex, and fights, but he doesn't glorify these moments either." --American Indians in Children's Literature