Legendary Frybread Drive-In
Legendary Frybread Drive-In: Intertribal Stories edited by Cynthia Leitich Smith
i've read a few single-author short story collections recently, and it's nice to dive into one that's tapping a whole variety of authors instead! though this did make me despair a little bit about how hard it's become to switch my brain over from grownup-book-reading mode to YA-book-reading mode, when children's lit was my whole bread and butter a decade ago. life goes on, i suppose!
i love a collection centered around a premise, and this is a really compelling one: Sandy June's Legendary Frybread Drive-In occupies a kind of metaphysical space outside of time, findable to Indigenous people from wherever they happen to be when they need a welcoming place to rest, or the love and advice of grandparents and aunties and cousins, or just the comfort foods of home. it's a marvelous connecting thread between stories of young people from a range of places and tribes, discovering Sandy June's for the first time or taking regular shifts there. and the stories, as you might imagine, touch on a variety of young adult concerns: from the very broadly applicable, like crushes and friendship and family strife, to the deeply specific stresses of displacement and disconnection and not feeling "Native enough."
these topics are all handled ably enough, with a few shining standouts: "Game Night" by Darcie Little Badger, about the struggles of geographical and emotional distance in online friendships; "Look Away" by Karina Iceberg, about miscommunication in young romance; and "Momentum," about the intersection of art and identity. but i think the collection as a whole suffers a little from a disagreement of audience—some of these stories are clearly written with non-Native readers in mind, compellingly in some cases and in others stumbling over explanations in the effort to usher an unfamiliar reader into the author's culture. on the other hand, some of the stories are aimed more directly at Native youth, dropping the reader into their worlds without feeling any need to explain or translate. personally, i prefer the latter, and enjoy entering the experience of someone else's life knowing that it's not for me specifically, but that i can still learn from it. but i'm not a young adult anymore, regardless—so take this preference with a grain of salt. it could be very useful for a teen reader to have some more didactic stories mixed in with the immersive ones, though it made the whole collection feel lacking in cohesion for me.
but regardless, there's always room and need for more Indigenous stories and Indigenous authors in the literary landscape, and the focus issues of this collection don't outweigh its other exciting qualities for me: the satisfyingly fantastical nature of Sandy June's, and the uniting theme of community and identity as a support in the face of life's struggles. also, it made me EXTREMELY hungry for frybread, which i've never had and need to find an occasion to try!
how i read it: another combo of NetGalley access and Libby ebook!
try this if you: dig the trials of the young adult experience, are into or want to read more Indigenous lit, or love a magically appearing and disappearing locale.
some lines i really liked: both of these struck me as extremely true-to-life descriptions
This is the game: my gaze rises to his, and he finds somewhere else to look. Then he glances back up at me, and I look down at the fish.
There is one minor problem with our game.... I might be the only one playing it.
On Saturday morning, Kathy woke up feeling depressed. Depression was a complex emotion to describe, but how she would have summed it up was that she didn't feel like she could get out of bed, that she couldn't imagine wanting to get out of bed, and so she was relatively sure that she would not get out of bed.
pub date: August 26, 2025! go forth and pick this up for yourself or a teen in your life.
