Home Waltz
“I felt privileged to live inside this very personal world of Squito’s.” – Nathan H.
Finalist, 2021 Governor General's Literary Award
In Squito Bob, Gordon Grisenthwaite has given us a latter-day Holden Caufield, fighting hormones, toxic friendships, and the general stupidity of others in the fleeting hope of his own brief shot at transcendence. Home Waltz is a tour de force, full of compassion and insight and humour and utterly unflinching in its look at the hard truths of life on the rez.
—Nino Ricci
Praise for Home Waltz
Family friend Nathan H:
… I was absolutely gobsmacked in terms of how much I was impacted by this amazing story. Squito is one of the most real and visceral characters I’ve encountered in a long time. I not only felt like I was in Squito’s world, I felt like I lived his journey along with him. It was highly charged and hugely emotional. A very personal experience. I felt privileged to live inside this very personal world of Squito’s. It actually felt invasive to share his headspace and raw emotions to this depth. But not in an offensive way; in a way that you want to be absorbed as a reader.
As much as I could relate to many of Squito’s teenage struggles, I also felt that as a white European, there’s things that I could never fully relate to or understand the depth of the struggles of a First Nations teenager. But this felt right as a reader…feeling this alienation added to the alienation that Squito felt.
Goodreads reviewer R: “An exceptional novel about a few days in a teenage boy”s life on Canadian First Nations land in the 1970s. Heartbreaking and brilliant.”
Goodreads reviewer Jon Weller: “[T]]he story grew on me, the characters developed and a different level of humanness came through and I found myself caring for and finding a lot more compassion than I expected.”
Goodreads reviewer Darryl Suite:
What I loved most about this book is that Grisenthwaite wasn’t pandering to the reader. He wasn’t writing this book with me in mind. Sometimes authors try to over-explain/simplify things for readers who aren’t part of their culture, in order to make it easier for “outsiders” to digest. And this book didn’t do that. It’s refreshing that he didn’t feel the need to do that. He wrote the book he wanted to write. Refreshing. Loved this.