Scavenger

the long version

Scavenger is a first novel by Dennison Smith about cravings and the desire to fly. The narrator is a young girl of Irish descent growing up in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona, in the late 1970s with a swimming pool, a drunken mother, and a father who stands absently in every door frame, and speaks only through his music. At 13 she runs away from home and eventually comes to live with a Navajo woman on a reservation, where she is submerged in the stories, culture and spiritualism of Native America. It is a beautiful and often harsh story, which also contrasts the absurdities and disparities of the materially affluent lifestyle of suburban America with the third-world conditions on the - spiritually rich - Indian reservation.