8. Sing Down the Moon by Scott O'Dell

My daughter chose this as the next one for her bedtime reading.  The Island of the Blue Dolphins was subtly sad, only really if you understood the context and read the afterword which she refused to do (though the attack on her people at the beginning by the Aleuts was pretty rough).  This one was brutal!  I feel like it may be better appreciated by an older child of maybe 12 or 13.  Nevertheless, my 10-year old got a pretty direct lesson in the horrors of colonialism.  To top it off, my father had died on the night that we read the harshest chapter where the shitfuck white man drives the Navajo off their land and destroys  their crops and homes.  We were both pretty bummed but it led to a good discussion of whether it is better or worse to read something as dark from history as this while you have your own sadness in life.

This is another fictional retelling of the real history of what is known as The Long Walk, where white settlers drove several tribes of indigenous people from their lands to what is now known as the four corners in the middle of the country.  It is told from the perspective of a young girl who is just taking on the responsibility of shepherding the family's sheep.  The first section is about her getting kidnapped by a Spanish soldier and then her escape, where the reader gets a brief break from the sadness before "the long knives" as they call the settler soldiers come and force them to march from their home lands in Arizona to eastern New Mexico, where their descendants live today.  I don't know what the Navajo people feel about a white settler descendant writing about their history, but this book is straightforward and very affecting.