"A deceptively straightforward novel, at least in its telling, that sneaks up to unsettle by making us take a fresh look at what may seem familiar."
Electric Literature - Steve Himmer
"Hogan's Power is a bildungsroman. It is a lament for the animals and plants we have so heedlessly extinguished and it is also a story hopeful for the restoration of a world in balance."
"[Hogan] has written a book about a crisis of belief that is dizzying in its depths, a book that is a testament to the ability of people to imagine what they cannot articulate."
Hogan has done more in this novel than to illustrate the cultural conflict that occurs when disparate ways of comprehending the world collide. She has written a book about a crisis of belief that is dizzying in its depths, a book that is a testament to the ability of people to imagine what they cannot articulate. -- Boston Book Review
Sixteen-year-old Omishita Eaton and her adoptive Aunt Ama, the main characters of Chickasaw Indian Hogan's (Solar Storms) thought-provoking new bildungsroman, are members of the fictional Taiga tribe of Florida, a dwindling group down to its last 30 members. After a devastating hurricane, Ama and the girl track a wounded deer into the swamps, using it as a stalking horse to hunt a panther, an animal sacred to the Taiga. Ama kills the cat, a scrawny, flea-bitten example of its species, and is charged with poaching and violations of the Endangered Species Act. The event tears the Taiga community apart. Most castigate her for slaying the sacred animal, but Omishita stands by her. Though Ama's motives are never made entirely clear, there are intimations that she undertook the taboo act in the hope of sparking a regeneration not only of the Taiga culture but of all Creation itself. Hogan is known principally as a poet, and the current work reflects that vocation in her lyrical, almost mystical use of language. The novel is about two different ways of knowing the world and the problems that ensue when these ways come into conflict. Though slow at times, this is nonetheless a novel of gentle rewards. (May)
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Before her time, a 16-year-old Native American girl is thrust into adult turmoil as the only witness to the shooting by her best friend of an endangered Florida panther, in Hogan's (Solar Storm, 1995, etc.) latest complex exploration of Native ways and the environment at risk. Omishto (a Taiga name meaning "One Who Watches") is one of the last of her tribe, and though only an adolescent sheþs already experienced many horrors: her older brother burning to death, her stepfather's physical abuse and lust, her mother's desperate, self-destructive effort to pass as white. When a hurricane comes along, flattening the land and trapping her outside, she sees deer flying and Methuselah, a tree dating from before the Spanish arrival, uprooted. After the storm, nothing seems the way it was before, so when her friend and protector Ama—like Omishto, a member of the Panther Clan—takes her on a trek through the devastation to find and shoot the panther Ama calls "Grandmother," the hunt seems as unreal as everything else. Reality hits home only when Ama is arrested and tried for the killing, and Omishto is called to testify. Ama is found not guilty, but she then has to face an even more harrowing trial: that of the tribal elders, who accuse her of trying to gain spiritual power by killing a sacred animal. Omishto, who must testify before the elders, finally begins to understand why her friend acted as she didþbut sheþs sworn by Ama not to say why. Because of that, Ama is banished from the tribe. Maintaining a difficult balance between her understanding and her sense of loss, Omishto moves into Ama's house, forsaking her own family, to decide what path her own lifeshould follow. While the narrative often seems an uneasy blend of the visionary and the message-driven, the result is nonetheless an evocative coming-of-age saga. And the portrait of natureþs elemental power is distinctive and haunting.
