I read this book months ago; it has stayed in a warm place in my memory for about a year. Browsing through the stacks at Amazon, I come across it and am surprised that only one person has reviewed it. It's well written, it's an interesting insight into a life different from mine in almost every way -- money, geography, religion, vocabulary, etc. Yet my life and this fictional life are still very American. Reading it, learning about a different America from a great Amercain writer, made me a better person. It gets my highest recommendation.

Glancy is an underratted underknown writer of incredible sensitivity and expression. Her prose is consistently understated, but that doesn't keep it from conveying anguish and complexity in this story of an innocent girl in a gritty landscape. Closest to Kaye Gibbons, but Gibbons is looser. Oprah Oprah, why haven't you read this one???

I've just read the novel for the fourth time. Not to recapture a glow once felt. Rather to meet again an attractive, if melancholic, woman who continues to mystify and amuse. Novelist Glancy got her inspiration from Acts of the Apostles (9:36-43). Indeed the novel may be said to be something of a pastiche of that passage, but she takes the few words and turns them into a tapestry. The time, the beginning of the Christian era. The central figure lies dead in the upper room of her own house. A woman known not only for her good works as a new Christian but also for her good work as a seamstress, designer, and manufacturer of all sorts of garments. The widows mourn, the messengers run for Simon Peter, who happens to be in town. He returns, calling from the dead Tabitha (as she was known in Aramaic); Dorcas (as she was known in Greek, the language of Acts). He did so, but without having asking her if she wanted to return; she didn't. The first sentences are perhaps her epitaph. "I only want to sew, to have my hands in the threads.... Sewing is my prayer." Yes, sewing is the motif. And what Glancy herself has sewn is a first-class character in a world-class novel. I shall read it again soon.

If you are like me, you are bored with the modern American poetry scene (save for a handful of fine writers). Might I suggest Native American poetry? Native American authors are publishing some of the finest poetry I have ever read - it is very real, it shakes you to the bone! In "Iron Woman", Diane lets us in to feel the unique emotions, see the unusual visions of a mixed-blood life. I'm only sorry such authors do not receive the recognition they deserve. Excellent poetry!

The way Flutie copes with the poverty & turmoil of herfamily is in ever-increasing silence. She is not only afraid to speak,she is afraid of being. As I read I wondered if I was supposed to like this book, this heroine, this mute misery. I often had to re-read sections to make sense of it & sometimes that sense was horrible. Partly because of Flutie's inarticulateness, partly because of her raw-boned neediness, partly because of her hidden voice. This is a devastating coming-of-age of one very lost girl stumbling toward womanhood. Worth the effort!...

Flutie is shy, pathologically shy, but her voice emerges in the narrative that emerges from her thoughts, in fits and starts, just as her life emerges in fits and starts. We see her in these few pages go from 13 to 20, to being unable to speak in class to trying. Her family is as rich and real as the scenes painted by her imagination, so the story becomes not only a personal one but also a story about people stuck for different reasons in western Oklahoma. Flutie's shyness could be a metaphor for the silencing of her people. The book is like poetry, every word in place and evocative of the interior and geographical landscape of Flutie's life. We see a debt to her indigenous ancestors and a debt to her parents. The narrative does seem to end too quickly, with a decision that seems to come without much preparation, as if it is too pat and too expected for what has come before. But I read that last few pages a few times to try to reconcile myself with the ending, and I still liked the book. It offers a wonderful, rich story.

I found this book to be repetitive regarding information and the central character to be too self-involved and whiney for my taste. These problems distracted me from the substance of the novel and made it an effort to read. I did find the incorpratioon of Cherokee language interesting.

Having heard the story in my partly-Cherokee family all my life, this is the first telling that has put me there on the trail with the suffering of the people, native american and whites alike, who walked it. The varying voices expressing the ordeal of each day thru their eyes and being, brought this historical experience to life , especially since the various characters are given very different amounts of speaking time. Things weren't fair on the trail of tears nor were they equal. The many characters Glancy uses to speak, bring this message alive. I loved this novel and will re-read it several times.

The mythical status of Sacajawea is seductive indeed, and Diane Glancy attempts to fashion a novel that gives that myth a much needed rest, trying to get into the voice and experience of the "real" Sacajawea, but as always, language is the heart and soul of any recreation of historical voice, and here is where voice fails Glancy. The writing simply is not good enough. The second person narration makes the character a bit too literary, a bit to fashionable, leaving this reader bored by its simplistic syntax and unimaginative detail. Who knows what Sacajawea thought and dreamed! As Irish poet Eavan Boland suggests, one improvises when faced with this mystery. The improvisaiton here is uninspired. The fragments of journals from the expedition, rather than moving the novel along, impede its flow. This novel is considered experimental, I suppose, but the experiment fails. Why? Because the voice and language fail.