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Jonny Appleseed

Joshua Whitehead

4.06 · Rating details · 4,725 ratings · 717 reviews

"You're gonna need a rock and a whole lotta medicine" is a mantra that Jonny Appleseed, a young Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer, repeats to himself in this vivid and utterly compelling novel. Off the reserve and trying to find ways to live and love in the big city, Jonny becomes a cybersex worker who fetishizes himself in order to make a living. Self-ordained as an NDN glitter prin ...more

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Paperback, 224 pages

Published May 15th 2018 by Arsenal Pulp Press

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· 4,725 ratings · 717 reviews

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Mar 23, 2020 Lala BooksandLala rated it really liked it

Shelves: read-in-2020

This was just the slice of life narrative I really dig.

Book 15 of 30 for my 30 day reading challenge.

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Nov 04, 2018 Meike rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2018-read, canada

I've never read anything like this, and I just loved it: Joshua Whitehead wrote a coming-of-age story about Jonny, a young 2SQ (Two-Spirit, queer Indigenous) person who leaves the rez to make a life for himself in the city. There, Jonny is supporting himself as a sex worker and gets caught up in a love triangle with Tias and Jordan who are also Native American (if you want to know their gender, just read the book! :-)). When Jonny's stepfather dies, he has to make enough money to travel back to I've never read anything like this, and I just loved it: Joshua Whitehead wrote a coming-of-age story about Jonny, a young 2SQ (Two-Spirit, queer Indigenous) person who leaves the rez to make a life for himself in the city. There, Jonny is supporting himself as a sex worker and gets caught up in a love triangle with Tias and Jordan who are also Native American (if you want to know their gender, just read the book! :-)). When Jonny's stepfather dies, he has to make enough money to travel back to the rez in order to support his mourning mother...

This novel shines with its fantastic protagonist and first-person narrator who, while trying to come to terms with who he is, contemplates questions of family, home, tradition, sexuality, love and friendship - and Jonny is not the passive type: For all the setbacks, pain and hardship he has endured, he is still someone who dares to feel life with all its ups and downs, who throws himself into it, who unapologetically lives the way he wants to. All characters in this novel are highly complex, with their personal tragedies and traumas, but also their own dreams and aspirations.

I have to admit that first I didn't know what 2SQ was, but there's an interesting text by Whitehead which he wrote when he withdrew from the Lambda Award that had nominated his book full-metal indigiqueer in the "Trans Poetry" category. Whitehead explained: "I recognize the difficulty of categorizing Two-Spirit (2SQ) within Western conceptualizations of sex, sexuality, and gender. I cling to Two-Spirit because it became an honour song that sung me back into myself as an Indigenous person, a nehiyaw (Cree), an Oji-Cree; I have placed it into my maskihkîwiwat, my medicine bag, because it has healed and nourished me whenever I needed it. To be Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer, for me, is a celebration of the fluidity of gender, sex, sexuality, and identities, one that is firmly grounded within nehiyawewin (the Cree language) and nehiyaw world-views."

This quote also sheds light on "Jonny Appleseed", where Whitehead frequently includes Cree words and talks about Oji-Cree traditions and how they shape the protagonist and his life both on the rez and in the city. This is not a didactic book though - the reader learns about Oji-Cree culture while learning about Jonny's thoughts and emotions, which is a realistic representation of how our upbringing and cultural contexts influence our personalities.

I don't feel like I can write a review that does this novel justice. This is a book that makes you feel like you can connect to and understand people who live in a country you never visited and in a culture you know almost nothing about. You close the book and you start missing Jonny, because his humanity and his humor transcend all that separates you from him. Joshua Whitehead needs to write more books ASAP. ...more

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Jul 09, 2018 CaseyTheCanadianLesbrarian rated it it was amazing

Shelves: canadian, indigenous, 5-stars, poc-canlesbrarian, queer, fiction, sex-work, two-spirit

What a beautiful, sad, funny book. It's the most poignant reminder I've had in a while about how powerful and effecting a first person narrative can be. Jonny, the two-spirit main character, carries the book with his raw, hilarious, insightful voice. The story meanders through his memories, mostly of his kokum, mom, and his great first love Tias, while in the present Jonny prepares to go back to the rez for his mom's boyfriend's funeral.

Favourite quotes:

"Humility is just a humiliation you loved ...more

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Jan 03, 2019 Gerhard rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: gay-interest, 2019, favorites

I am so chuffed that Joshua Whitehead won the Gay Fiction category in the 2019 Lambda Literary Awards! Hugely deserved. And kudos to Arsenal Pulp Press for bagging additional awards for Lesbian Fiction (The Tiger Flu) and Transgender Fiction (Little Fish).

I recently read an article by Jonathan Rauch, Contributing Editor at The Atlantic, entitled ‘It’s Time to Drop the LGBT From LGBTQ’. Rauch’s basic argument is that we need a new term that effectively humanises all sexual minorities, as opposed I am so chuffed that Joshua Whitehead won the Gay Fiction category in the 2019 Lambda Literary Awards! Hugely deserved. And kudos to Arsenal Pulp Press for bagging additional awards for Lesbian Fiction (The Tiger Flu) and Transgender Fiction (Little Fish).

I recently read an article by Jonathan Rauch, Contributing Editor at The Atlantic, entitled ‘It’s Time to Drop the LGBT From LGBTQ’. Rauch’s basic argument is that we need a new term that effectively humanises all sexual minorities, as opposed to reducing them to gloops of alphabet soup.

To some extent, the very artificiality and awkwardness of the acronymic acrobatics speak to their ecumenical aspirations. Unlike designations popularized by oppressors (Negro, Oriental) or based on national or ethnic particularism (Italian, Jew, wasp), LGBTQ is pointedly coalitional and inclusive, and we chose it ourselves. In that respect, its intended message is admirable. But it carries an unintended message as well: an embrace of the identity politics and group separatism that have soured millions of Americans on progressivism and egalitarianism.

And we all know where that has ended up, with Trump chipping away at hard-won civil liberty freedoms and victories on a daily basis. I think this point is brought home quite forcefully by a novel such as this, where Joshua Whitehead manages the miraculous task of placing the reader within the skin of a “Two-Spirit and queer Indigenous folx”.

Jonny’s positioning in the alphabet soup of contemporary identity and gender politics is, er, a bit fluid, but that is precisely Whitehead’s point. We need to understand everybody as people, and not as acronyms.

(Speaking of which, there is no explanation in the book for ‘NDN’, which lead me on a rambling but highly informative Google search … so perhaps that is part of the author’s project here as well, to force the reader to investigate further, and get out of his or her comfort zone a bit more.)

The writing here is gorgeous. You can’t simply quote a single sentence, but rather long swathes of ecstatic prose. So I just gave up, as virtually my entire Kindle version was turning yellow. Colour, ethnicity, and cultural heritage are major themes here, which resonated particularly with me in a South African context.

Whitehead is too savvy a writer to wear his polemic on his sleeve though, so instead hides it in the secret folds and orifices of Jonny’s body, who comments at the beginning that “There are tons of unfuckable holes in me that need to be filled.”

One would expect such a story to have a traditional and conservative non-happy ending, but again Whitehead is effortlessly subversive in the way he subverts reader expectations. This is a beautiful and important book that demands not only to be read, but to be lived out as a manifesto of tolerance and equality. ...more

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Nov 19, 2018 Krista rated it really liked it

Shelves: indigenous, 2018, can-con

It turns out that Johnny Appleseed is some American folk legend who became famous by planting apple trees in West Virginia. I didn't understand why we'd sung about him in camp – I wanted to know about Louis Riel, Chief Peguis, and Buffy St. Marie, but instead we were honouring some white man throwing apple seeds in frontier America. Apparently he was this moral martyr figure who remained a virgin in exchange for the promise of two wives in heaven. Oh, and he loved animals, and I heard he save

It turns out that Johnny Appleseed is some American folk legend who became famous by planting apple trees in West Virginia. I didn't understand why we'd sung about him in camp – I wanted to know about Louis Riel, Chief Peguis, and Buffy St. Marie, but instead we were honouring some white man throwing apple seeds in frontier America. Apparently he was this moral martyr figure who remained a virgin in exchange for the promise of two wives in heaven. Oh, and he loved animals, and I heard he saved some horse by hand-feeding him blades of grass, Walt Whitman-style. I would bet my left nut that he was a slave owner too and planted his seeds on Treaty territory. All I know is this: apples are crazy expensive on the rez and they had now become bad things in my head.

Two-Spirit, Indigiqueer author Joshua Whitehead has created a really remarkable character with Jonny Appleseed: knowing himself to be different from the other boys while growing up on the rez, Jonny eventually declares his own Two-Spirit nature – which comes as no surprise to his rock-solid mother and doting kookum – and after high school, moves to Winnipeg where he hopes to find love. As the story starts, Jonny's stepdad has died, his Mom wants Jonny to return home for the funeral, and the only way he can hustle up the money is to turn a few more tricks as a (mostly cyber-based) “NDN glitter princess”. Over the time it takes for Jonny to make enough money, the narrative fluidly traces Jonny's history and present, showing pain and love and friendship and family; Jonny has had it hard without becoming hard.

Throughout his life, Jonny has had one good friend, Thias – a “friend with benefits” who claims he isn't gay – and throughout the story, this relationship is Jonny's rock:

Instead of saying we liked or loved each other, we just lay there on our backs, our brown skin shiny in the rosy light that poured in from the evening sun. We surveyed each others' body: him seeing the scar above my clavicle from when I fell down the stairs as a kid, and me seeing the patch of hair missing from his scalp. I knew then that I loved him.

Funny how an NDN “love you” sounds more like, “I'm in pain with you.”

The book is full of these quotable lines, but also full of pop culture references, quirky observations, and social commentary (it's not overtly political, but it's apparent that history and politics have shaped reality for Jonny and those he knows). It also has plenty of graphic sex, violence, and addictions. And still: Jonny isn't broken or defeated; he likes to walk around Walmart and imagine how he'd furnish his own house some day. The most vital part of Jonny Appleseed is best described by Joshua Whitehead himself in the afterword:

I write this book with the goal of showing you that Two-Spirit and queer Indigenous folx are not a “was”, that we are not the ethnographic and romanticized notations of “revered mystic” or “shamanic”, instead we are an is and a coming. In nehiyawewin, there are no masculine or feminine attributes, instead we have animations in which we hold all our relations. We are accountable to those kin, be they inanimate or non-human, or be they unabashedly queer, femme, bottom, pained, broken. We put our most vulnerable in the centre and for once I do just that: 2S folx and Indigenous women are centred here. I hold our relations accountable for us for once. Jonny has taught me a lot of things but there are two that I want to share with you: one, a good story is always a healing ceremony, we recuperate, re-member, and rejuvenate those we storytell into the world; and two, if we animate our pain, it becomes something we can make love to.

Like many others, I've heard the term “Two-Spirit” and imagined I had an idea of what that meant, so it was very interesting to me to read a story that focussed on what the lived experience of a Two-Spirit person is actually like. This book is both an eye-opener and a thought-provoking read; I'll round up to four stars. ...more

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Aug 30, 2018 Jessie rated it it was amazing

Stop everything you are doing and read this book. It’s everything I love about Indigenous storytelling. About a young Oji-Cree two spirit Indigequeer NDN in the week leading up to his stepfather’s funeral, this book is a gift. I appreciate the contemporary nature of this book, both in it’s sense of now (the technology, the terminology, what’s current in the world of pop culture), but also in it’s sense of place (it’s the world exactly now, it’s Winnipeg and Peguis exactly now). The other thing a ...more

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Nov 11, 2018 Emmkay rated it it was ok

Shelves: 2018-reads, canadian, fiction, gender-stuff, indigenous

Some beautiful and poignant writing, and also some very funny lines, in this story about a two-spirited young indigenous man in Winnipeg, trying to earn enough money webcamming to catch a ride back to the rez for a funeral. It felt kind of like a one-man Fringe show in its tone and its focus on the protagonist - I would have appreciated more narrative momentum (and maybe fewer bodily fluids and smells, but hey, that’s me). 2.5.

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Oct 31, 2019 TraceyL rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: canadian-authors, contemporary

The story of a young, gay, First Nations Canadian man who works as a prostitute, and what it was like growing up gay on a reservation. I think it was pretty forgettable.

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Apr 11, 2018 Mya rated it really liked it

There are so many things in this novel that make it beautifully queer. Its 2-spirit protagonist; its nonlinear timeline that intentionally meanders through past stories of family and tradition, trauma and survival; its descriptions of eroticism and the discovery and exploration of sexuality ... I could go on.

Joshua Whitehead is a master of words. There were at least a dozen killer sentences that I felt compelled to highlight as I was reading, particularly because I felt they captured the experie ...more

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Sep 04, 2018 Shawn Mooney (Shawn The Book Maniac) marked it as did-not-finish

Shelves: did-not-finish-2018

This read like a shitty first draft, alas. There were enough tender, raw sentences scattered throughout the first several chapters to keep me going, mesmerized by a wee bit of evidence of an exciting new voice. But after that, unfortunately, it read like slapdash notes toward a novel rather than fully realized fictional prose—and notes published in haphazard order at that. Bailed 60% of the way in.

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Jul 02, 2018 Alanna Why rated it really liked it

Shelves: favorites

Like most queer lit, this book is SAD but also GOOD. I really liked the non-linear way it was told and how you really got to know the characters through the vignettes of Jonny's memory. The best part of this book is any scene with Jonny and his kokum because they LOVE EACH OTHER SO MUCH and it is VERY NICE. ...more

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May 26, 2019 Kiki rated it it was amazing

Shelves: indigenous, canada, queer, literary-fiction

Gad damn.

What the hell am I going to read after this book?

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Jan 22, 2021 Kathleen rated it liked it

Shelves: 2021, lgbtq-author, canada-reads-finalists, canadian-bingo-2021, canadian-literature, indigenous-author, canadian-author, contemporary, fiction, debut-novel

I read Jonny Appleseed written by Joshua Whitehead because this novel was shortlisted for Canada Reads 2021. Joshua Whitehead is an Oji-Cree, two-spirit writer, poet and Indigiqueer scholar from Peguis First Nation. I listened to him being interviewed on CBC radio.
Jonny is a young man who has left the reserve for the city and the novel follows a painful, loving and powerful week in his life as he reflects on the brokenness and the beauty of his past.
I did not like the numerous raw and graphic ...more

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Mar 29, 2019 LenaRibka rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: general-literary-fiction, cultural, lambda-literary-award-finalists, glbt

31st Annual Lambda Literary Award Finalist

It was like reading a poem. Heartbreaking storytelling, a colorful mosaic of beautiful prose and raw reality, fragments of touching memories and tender spirituality, funny and sad at once.

A very impressive debut novel. ...more

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Oct 10, 2018 George K. Ilsley rated it it was amazing

Shelves: canada, glbt, fiction, first-nations, gay, spiritual

A powerful fiction debut. I first met Jonny in the pages of Malahat, and was very pleased to see he was going to be able to roam through his own book. Jonny's voice is strong and visceral, and there is a lot going on in this novel. Worth reading and re-reading. Strong debut novel from a new voice.

Update March 11, 2021 — this book just won this year’s Canada Reads competition. Congrats to Joshua Whitehead and Arsenal Pulp Press! ...more

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Aug 07, 2020 Ming rated it really liked it

Wow! There is magic in this writing--where "ordinary" words are placed and combined in such a way that music appears. I've just finished the book and I'm in awe at how language can be used in such extraordinary ways (see quotes below). Ah, and I'm reminded that Whitehead is a poet. The artistry is here and it is beautiful.

This story of Two-Spirit Jon as he grows up on a reservation in Canada and moves to the Big City is straight-forward, a coming-of-age arc. But this presentation has a subtle ...more

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Feb 15, 2021 Colleen Earle rated it liked it

Shelves: canada-reads

I really liked the writing style this book uses.
Like the last book I read, this one combines a linear story that is interspersed with non-linear memory.
It is a sad and painful book. A book that I think would have a lot more meaning to someone who isn’t me.

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Jan 18, 2021 Allison ༻hikes the bookwoods༺ rated it liked it

Shelves: bipoc-author, set-2000-present, canadian, la-bibliothèque-chez-moi, indigenous-author, bingo, x-canada-reads, lgbtq-author, gifted-to-me

CBC Books describes this book as "a unique, shattering vision of Indigenous life," and while I agree that it is both unique and devastating, I struggled to stay engaged with the text. It was too crude and too non-linear for me to develop any strong attachment to the protagonist. ...more

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Jun 28, 2020 MargaretDH rated it it was amazing

Shelves: contemporary, audiobook, literature, canada, awards

Jonny, our narrator, is a two-spirited young man living in Winnipeg, where he moved after his youth on the Peguis Reservation in central Manitoba. He's also a self-styled NDN glitter princess, and he makes his money as a cam boy. The action of the book takes place over a few days, when Jonny finds out his stepfather has died, and he needs to make enough money to pay his rent and get back to the reservation for the funeral, but much of the book consists of flashbacks and memories of Jonny's exper Jonny, our narrator, is a two-spirited young man living in Winnipeg, where he moved after his youth on the Peguis Reservation in central Manitoba. He's also a self-styled NDN glitter princess, and he makes his money as a cam boy. The action of the book takes place over a few days, when Jonny finds out his stepfather has died, and he needs to make enough money to pay his rent and get back to the reservation for the funeral, but much of the book consists of flashbacks and memories of Jonny's experiences with his family and growing up on the reservation.

This surprised me in how wonderful it was. Whitehead is a poet, and he has a knack for finding the beauty in the everyday. Jonny has a pigeon friend that lives outside his apartment, and I love that he made me look at pigeons in a whole new way. He's also got a real ear for dialogue and speech patterns, and a wry sense of humour. I wished the book were longer, just so I could have more conversations and more of Jonny's funny asides. He also really brings Winnipeg to life, a city that has it's own character.

Whitehead also does a wonderful job with complicated relationships, and how love can look many different ways. I did not expect this book to have such a strong emotional core. In his author's note, Whitehead said he wanted to highlight the strength of Indigenous women, and he presented us with a range of interesting women: Jonny's kookum, who is loving and hilarious in equal measure; his mother, who is pugnacious and Jonny's rock; Peggy, who is always busy with her multiple side hustles, yet always has time for community; and Jordan, resilient and ready to make her way in the world. I loved them all.

Jonny's life is not idyllic, and speaking of complicated relationships, Whitehead explores Jonny's use of drugs and alcohol, his feelings about camming, and what it was like to grow up different in a group of people already considered different by most the world. But for all this, Jonny isn't a mess. He is unbent and unbroken, moving through a world that's not always friendly.

I listened to the audio version of this, and I would definitely recommend you do the same. Whitehead reads it himself, and he really made Jonny come alive for me. He's got great pacing and vocal flexibility when it comes to the dialogue sections, and he infused a lot of emotion into the places where it needed to be. The book itself was probably a little over 4 stars, but the audio experiences bumps it up to a solid 5. ...more

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Jan 14, 2021 JennieWithTheBooks☮️(◕‿◕✿) rated it liked it

3.5⭐s

“Funny how an NDN ‘love you’ sounds more like ‘I’m in pain with you.’” …
Jonny felt MANY different types of pain throughout the pages of this seemingly infinitely quotable book.

It’s definitely a non-linear book, that feels VERY MUCH like the way a person’s mind goes to and fro, from the past to the present and from topic to topic.

A lot of the novel focuses on the women in Jonny’s life and the impact they’ve had on him. Joshua Whitehead writes elegantly and exactingly about Jonny’s state of ...more

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Nov 11, 2020 Ashley Marie rated it really liked it

Shelves: lgbtqiap, audiobook-would-recommend, bipoc-authors, realistic-contemporary-fiction

There's something incredibly special about an author reading their own work.

This is a slice-of-life tale about an Oji-Cree 2SQ (Two-Spirit queer) femme boy named Jonny. Throughout the book, he gives us snapshots of his life, from where he is now and where he's been. We meet his family and the people he surrounds himself with, particularly his beloved kokum. I was utterly absorbed in the whole thing, and having Joshua's voice in my ears truly brought Jonny's story to life. I've never read anythin ...more

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Dec 19, 2019 Daniel Justice rated it it was amazing

A phenomenal work--raw, unflinching, poignant, hilarious, and deeply moving. I enjoyed it as a reader and as a teacher of Indigenous literature, and it's one of my students' favourite reads. Highly recommended. ...more

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Aug 22, 2018 Rana rated it liked it

Oh boy, this is a bit of a stream of consciousness doozy. No real plot, no real story, just a brief foray into somebody's life. In a very good way, though. ...more

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Dec 20, 2020 Aubrey rated it really liked it

Shelves: person-of-everything, r-2020, 1-read-on-hand, antidote-think-twice-read, 4-star, r-goodreads, antidote-think-twice-all, person-of-reality, queer-as-in, reviewed

This book could have been a lot of things that it's not, and the fact that it's doing so well despite that gives me some hope regarding the literary industry and the world at large at the turn of the second decade of the 21st century. It could have sacrificed being for accurate labels, interior wrestling between the heart and the soul for a side character white person savior complex, the messy business of living for the kind of climactic traumatic pathos that gets those who only have to witness This book could have been a lot of things that it's not, and the fact that it's doing so well despite that gives me some hope regarding the literary industry and the world at large at the turn of the second decade of the 21st century. It could have sacrificed being for accurate labels, interior wrestling between the heart and the soul for a side character white person savior complex, the messy business of living for the kind of climactic traumatic pathos that gets those who only have to witness it all the film awards and those who have to live it another stereotype to reckon with on a daily basis. Jonny Appleseed sells his body to men, eats out at least one woman, gets thrown out of a second floor window, enjoys trips to Wal-Mart, appreciates his grandmother's diehard enjoyment of WWE, has some pretty amazing erotic dreams that wouldn't look too out of place in a book on Greek mythology, prioritizes drugs over therapy every single time, views society's "moochers"/"welfare queens"/etc as the heroes of the story, and otherwise breaks about every single unspoken rule for "respectable" white middle class living that there is, including the ones regarding pronouns and the like that "the gays/LGBTS" see as their cishet given right to police in others. This also isn't a book that allows the reader to distance themselves from the human body and/or render such in purely objectified formations as is customary in the written word, and the fact that that will make or break the book for certain (white) readers says enough about modern Euro conceptions of "art" and "worth" to merit a book or two. That, however, is not something I'm being paid to write, so you'll have to satisfied with my musing paragraphs instead.

If I had to compare this to something, I would do so to Dhalgren, and the fact that I liked that convoluted behemoth a lot more than this piece on an instinctive level only attests to how uncomfortable I am with my own body compared to the abstractness of printed words and all their invocations. Such is due as much to my own individual history as well as the systems that have been imprinted upon said individuality, and it often takes a work like this that disregards the assumed sacrosanct and embraces the presumed anathema for me to see how all my 'normality' is shot through with the bloodlines that have been on direct descent throughout the centuries ever since the time of the Euro crusades. I'm not sure when the rule of hygiene level directly correlating to moral worthiness was inculcated in me, or how many pieces of media I had to watch before I became more comfortable with the thought of blood than that of body odor, or why I didn't see before how impossible it is to be antiracist while remaining self-righteous about one's diet, or consumer habits, or adherence to the rules in any particular white supremacist socioeconomic establishment, and let me tell you, so long as settler states exist, that's all of them. Jonny Appleseed challenges all of that without even needing to say a single word about it, and it says a lot about a reader if they can get through that contention and appreciate the story of life being led despite resistance from many of the other characters as well as nearly every piece of media indoctrinating the contrary, or if they give up cause they don't like reading about scot-free dine and dashing or sniffing armpits. It's the difference between whether a reader came here looking to read a story, or whether they just wanted another self-help trip and assumed that this was the right kind of 'minority' literature to get it from.

I'm not going to say I absolutely adored this work, because I didn't. What I am going to say is that there is still a divide between the society that consumes that which we call 'literature' and those who are consumed by society: by that I mean, if you're the right type of demographic and write about massive sexual assault and mutilation, someone will upgrade the rating and call you "subversive", while if you're the wrong type and write about drinking used bath water, someone will downgrade the rating and call it "unengaging." What does that mean, exactly? Much as the word "degenerate" and other words with a history of indicating non-normative sexuality in a witch-hunting manner are either making a comeback or have just always been there in certain community vernaculars, today the canon is grappling with indigenous/queer/indigiqueers who are refusing to be beaten into a good plotline for someone more fit for society. Jonny Appleseed is beaten, to be sure, but true to a form that scares the Christians, the radfems, the upstanding citizen and the good neighbor, he uses that beating to bloom forth anew, and this is not a work that skimps on the more physical details of such. I'm sure there are works out there that take on such themes in a metaphorical manner more palatable to the kind of reader who finds their way on the judgment board of various literary awards, but honestly: where's the life in that? ...more

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Nov 23, 2018 Mj rated it liked it

Shelves: first-book, canadian, fiction, indigenous, 2018

Jonny Appleseed was a long-list nominee one high profile Canadian fiction award list and a shortlist nominee on another. Given the minimal number of nominations on these lists and the wealth of talented authors in Canada, this double nomination got my attention, especially since Jonny Appleseed is Joshua Whitehead’s debut novel.

The book is fiction but reads like a memoir - one of my favourite genres. Both the primary fictional character and the author are two-spirited indigenous individuals. Bas ...more

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Feb 18, 2021 Magdelanye rated it really liked it

Shelves: native-pride, social-commentary, autobiographical-fiction

We had nowhere to go, no one to turn to, so we stuck to ourselves. p89
I used to wonder if I might run out of tears. p125
None of us knew the words but we sang along anyways. p127

Brave, raw, sometimes tender sometimes sickening but always pushing up against the truth, this is a book that reads better if you are in love. I noticed the shift if not the exact moment that it happened, when I had stopped flinching and started empathizing. "I can't pray to a God I'm afraid of" states Jonny/Joshua on pag We had nowhere to go, no one to turn to, so we stuck to ourselves. p89
I used to wonder if I might run out of tears. p125
None of us knew the words but we sang along anyways. p127

Brave, raw, sometimes tender sometimes sickening but always pushing up against the truth, this is a book that reads better if you are in love. I noticed the shift if not the exact moment that it happened, when I had stopped flinching and started empathizing. "I can't pray to a God I'm afraid of" states Jonny/Joshua on page 20. Coming of age it was up to them to invent their own role as a two-spirited Idigiqueer. Reverence was experienced in the wonders of nature, how rapids...

split rocks and dissolved them into sand. I think of how water crafted this whole damn planet, carved it into animals. 68

I hope that Joshua has had the same loving support of mother and kokum as does Jonny, drawing on Native tradition. I found myself oddly reminiscent of other books that I have read that are set in the framework of a day. Less ambitious than Ullysses and not as nuanced and polished as Mrs. Dalloway, the day depicted here is more a week as Jonny prepares to go home for his mother's partners funeral; back to the rez where he has not visited in quite some time. The time is skewed as Jonny's hours, including flashbacks, nostalgia and regret.

...home isn't a space, it's a feeling....You have to sense it, smell it, taste it, hear it. And it isn't always comfortable. p20

I grew into this book, not everyone might. More challenging than comfortable, it's rambling as memoir with the skimpiest of plots and more sex tips than I needed to know; the melancholic exuberance of the narration verges on narcissism at times. This is hardly unusual though for many innovators and those who have the imagination and the courage to carve out their own reality. It will be very interesting to see what comes next, and what people make of the book on Canada Reads.

I may not have the best body but I do have a body- and it's a body that deserves to be touched and loved and owned, annit? p219 ...more

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Dec 23, 2019 Nicky rated it it was amazing

4.5* rounded up.

I had been dragging my heels to read this as part of Read Harder 2019 task #18. Instead I found a book I loved and a character that was unique, real, a little too raw at times and an “NDN glitter princess”.

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Dec 16, 2020 Lauren McDonald rated it really liked it

Going into reading this book, for some odd reason, I expected it to be more informational. More like a textbook than a memoir. When I was opened up to the world of storytelling and the very personal tales that make up the life of a Two-Spirit person I realized my pre-prejudices were absurd. Of course it would read like a life story, and doesnt that tell me far more than any textbook could? An outstanding read, what a life!

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Feb 14, 2021 Hayden rated it it was amazing

Such an illuminating, relatable, and honest account of a coming-of-age, queer indigenous story. At times I forgot it was a fiction book because it felt so real and honest. Whitehead as a way with words that is super thought provoking and at times very poetic! A much needed example of a queer-inclusive, matriarchal, supportive Indigenous family in a genre that is too often reduced to sad, abusive, gay-dies-at-the-end stories of queer hopelessness.

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Jan 30, 2021 Heather(Gibby) rated it really liked it

Shelves: giller-prize

A fictional story that reads like a memoir.
It is set in Winnipeg, (where I live)so I got a kick out of some of the references.

It gives a raw portrayal of life in Winnipeg for a two spirited young two spirited person who has moved into the city, and it supporting himself through online sexual interactions. It can be very graphic/specific at points, but though maybe not pleasant to listen to at times-provides pretty accurate portrayal of the importance that sex/sexuality is to Jonny's sense of s ...more

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About Joshua Whitehead

Joshua Whitehead

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Joshua Whitehead is an Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit storyteller and academic from Peguis First Nation on Treaty 1 territory in Manitoba. He is currently working toward a Ph.D. in Indigenous literatures and cultures at the University of Calgary on Treaty 7 territory. His most recent book of poetry, Full-Metal Indigiqueer, was shortlisted for the 2017 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry. In 2016, h ...more