In Response to: The Round House

The Round House made me feel so many things. I loved it. This book exemplifies the reason why I love literature; it gives you perspectives that you would never experience otherwise. Joe is a thirteen-year-old who represents all of the things it means to be thirteen on top of being a Native American in the eighties, and who has been through a horrible family trauma. He’s complicated. It’s never clear what the right thing is in this story, but those stories are the best. The opening of this story, and the issues revolving around the complications of jurisdiction on reservation versus non-reservation land reminded me of a movie called Wind River (2017). In that movie, a girl is found dead and raped, and there is a conflict pinning her murderer because of those jurisdictional complications. Like The Round House, the protagonist must go around the law in order to obtain true justice, but at the same time, this begs the question, what is justice?

As far as using this book in a classroom goes, I had a hard time deciding, and I’m not completely sure one way or the other yet. (I just read finished the final page five minutes ago, and everything is still marinating.) For now, I’m going to say that I would read this text with high school seniors as a class. I would recommend this book for mature sophomores and up. My struggle with this text doesn’t lie with the drinking, swearing, sex or even the sensitivity of Geraldine’s rape. My struggle is with Joe’s revenge. Whether another human being lives or dies is never something an individual is justified to take into their own hands, but that’s just my own belief. However, I would never want to lift up revenge as a moral option. Sure, Joe and Cappy pay for what they do too, but as a protagonist, Joe does have some kind of moral duty to uphold. Nonetheless, I’m going to be thinking about this one for a while.