Apple: (Skin to the Core)

by Eric Gansworth

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

A uniquely written novel-in-verse, set to the pacing of Beatles songs, Apple: (Skin to the Core) is a powerful memoir about the author's experience growing up in the Native community. Honest and profoundly raw, this is a compelling read for adults of all ages.

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WINNER, AMERICAN INDIAN YOUTH LITERATURE AWARD
HONOR, MICHAL L. PRINTZ AWARD
LONGLIST, NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

TIME 10 Best YA and Children's Books of the Year
NPR Best of the Year
Shelf Awareness Best of the Year
Publishers Weekly Big Indie Books of Fall
Amazon Best Book of the Month
​American Indians in Youth Literature Best of the Year​
CSMCL Best Multicultural Children's Books of the Year


"Stirring…. Raw and moving."—TIME

"Beautiful imagery and with words that soar and scald."—The Buffalo News

"Easily one of the best books to be published in 2020. The kind of book bound to save lives."— LitHub

"A powerful narrative about identity and belonging." —Paste Magazine

★ "Timely and important." —Booklist (starred)
★ "Searing yet dryly funny." —The Bulletin (starred)
★ "Exceptional." —Shelf-Awareness (starred)
★​ "Captivating​." —S​chool Library Journal (starred)

The term "Apple" is a slur in Native communities across the country. It's for someone supposedly "red on the outside, white on the inside."

In Apple (Skin to the Core), Eric Gansworth tells his story, the story of his family—of Onondaga among Tuscaroras—of Native folks everywhere. From the horrible legacy of the government boarding schools, to a boy watching his siblings leave and return and leave again, to a young man fighting to be an artist who balances multiple worlds.

Eric shatters that slur and reclaims it in verse and prose and imagery that truly lives up to the word heartbreaking.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781646142033
Publisher:	Levine Querido
Publication date:	09/06/2022
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	125,445
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	12 - 18 Years

About the Author

Eric Gansworth, Sˑha-weñ na-saeˀ, (Onondaga, Eel Clan) is a writer and visual artist, born and raised at Tuscarora Nation. He’s been widely published and has had numerous solo and group exhibitions. Lowery Writer-in-Residence at Canisius College, he has also been an NEH Distinguished Visiting Professor at Colgate University. His work has received a Printz Honor Award, was Longlisted for the National Book Award and has received an American Indian Library Association Youth Literature Award, PEN Oakland Award and American Book Award. Gansworth's work has also been supported by the Library of Congress, the New York
Foundation for the Arts, the Arne Nixon Center, the Saltonstall and Lannan Foundations.

Editorial Reviews

09/28/2020

Originally conceived as a series of paintings, this ambitious memoir in verse by Gansworth (Give Me Some Truth), an enrolled member of the Onondaga Nation, explores intersectional identities alongside matters of generational and personal experience, erasure, and memory: “So much of my culture feels on the verge of vanishing. I wonder what part of that I’m contributing to with my own lack of knowledge.” Gansworth first describes his family’s history, beginning with his grandfather’s time in Native American boarding schools, where “you are being taught systematically to forget so that you will have nothing left to pass on to your children.” Subsequent sections detail variations on feeling like an outsider: Onondaga Gansworth’s childhood on a Tuscarora reservation, the way his early interest in art and pop culture (Batman, the Beatles) made him stand out among his peers, and his adulthood as a gay man after leaving the reservation. Phrases and concepts circle and repeat throughout—“apple,” for example, appears both as a pejorative (“red on the outside, white on the inside”) and in reference to the Beatles’ Apple Records, after which the work is structured—creating a raw, layered story about love and loss of community, culture, and place. Family photos, black-and-white reproductions of the author’s paintings, and project “liner notes” round out the telling. Ages 12–up. Agent: Jim McCarthy, Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. (Oct.)■

Publishers Weekly

"With language rich in metaphor, this is a timely and important work that begs for multiple readings." - BOOKLIST (starred review)

"Easily one of the best books to be published in 2020. The kind of book bound to save lives." - LIT HUB

"A searing yet dryly funny, at times intimate and at times highly literary picture of life hemmed in by majoritarian expectations and gutted by exploitation that made staying in the family home intolerable but leaving it unthinkable." - BCCB

"Exceptional..A stirring depiction of Indigenous life likely to evoke empathy from and resonate with all who venture into Gansworth's world." - SHELF-AWARENESS (starred review)

"A powerful narrative about identity and belonging." - PASTE MAGAZINE

"A raw, layered story about love and loss of community, culture, and place."- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

From the Publisher

★ 12/01/2020

Gr 7 Up—This bittersweet but ultimately inspiring memoir in verse chronicles Gansworth's experience raised on a reservation. Gansworth, who is an enrolled Onondaga writer and artist, was born and raised at the Tuscarora Nation. The text aims to illuminate the truth about his family history and the trauma that shaped Gansworth's life. Black-and-white photos and original graphic art supplement the text. The book's very effective format creates emotional resonance. The straightforward narrative showcases themes of betrayal, racism, struggle, acceptance, resilience, risk, coming of age, and the power of family and community. The text opens by confronting and reclaiming the slur "Apple," which is a derogatory term used to describe a Native person who is "red on the outside, white on the inside." Gansworth's deft storytelling skills shine; he is not afraid to examine uncomfortable truths. He writes honestly about the appropriation of Native American songs and dances, the effects of boarding school on both sets of grandparents, learning his native language, longing for his father's approval, friendship, feeling lost, and leaving home for college. Throughout the narrative, he incorporates references to pop culture, such as television programs, movies, Batman, comic books, the Beatles, KISS, and Pink Floyd. All teens will relate to Gansworth's profound portraits of joy, pain, and hope. VERDICT A well-written and captivating autobiography about the modern-day Indigenous experience that should be widely shared. Recommended for middle and high school libraries.—Naomi Caldwell, Alabama State Univ., Montgomery

School Library Journal

Poetic, intense, and defiant, Native American author and artist Eric Gansworth delivers his own coming-of-age story. The youngest child of seven, he grew up on a reservation outside Buffalo, New York, amid abject poverty and systemic racism. Like many children of the 1960s and ‘70s, he adopted pop culture icons like the Beatles, Batman, and Star Wars as his own and watched his brothers go off to Vietnam. Other siblings simply left and never returned. Later, catching up with the history and challenges of his own Onondaga culture was more problematic. Hearing Gansworth read passages in his grandparents’ native Tuscarora language is heartwarming and heartbreaking at once. This is the sound of an important, often overlooked, piece of America. B.P. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

NOVEMBER 2020 - AudioFile

2020-08-04
Native American identity issues are explored in this ambitiously structured memoir in verse.

Gansworth (Onondaga) grew up among Tuscaroras. A minority on his reservation, his identity was further complicated by tribal intermarriage and the fact that three of his grandparents suffered forced assimilation in Indian boarding schools. Fascinated with Batman and masks, his boyhood was spent looking for a costume that would reveal his true self. His mother warned “it’s a white man’s world” while also acknowledging that Gansworth himself seemed destined for more. The memoir is high concept, structured like a palimpsest over the Beatles’ oeuvre. The title alludes to the Beatles’ Apple Records as well as the Native slur that implies someone is “red on the outside, white on the inside.” Written in a nostalgic tone, the book emphasizes cultural dislocation: “So much of my culture feels on the verge of vanishing. I wonder what part of that I’m contributing to with my own lack of knowledge.” Gansworth’s take on his great-uncles’ “erasing themselves too fully to ever come home” complicates his efforts to reclaim the pejorative. From his childhood to his life as a college student and writer, the book skims over a lifetime; feelings of intimacy and emotional intensity are variable even as the elliptical voice is unique. Black-and-white reproductions of Gansworth’s paintings and family photographs enhance and extend the text in a work originally conceived of as a visual arts project.

A rare and special read. (liner notes, section notes, note about the art) (Verse memoir. 12-18)

Kirkus Reviews