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Title: A Sky Without Stars

Author: Linda S. Clare

Narrator: Linda Henning

Format: Unabridged

Length: 7 hrs

Language: English

Release date: 08-19-15

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 3 of 5 out of 1 votes

Genres: Fiction, Historical

Publisher's Summary:

Frankie Chasing Bear is caught between cultures. She wants to raise her son Harold to revere his Lakota heritage, but she knows he will need to learn the white man's ways to succeed. After the untimely death of her husband, Frankie joins the US Government's Relocation Program and moves to Arizona. There she begins sewing a Lakota Star pattern quilt for Harold with tribal wisdom sung, sewn, and prayed into it. A bed without a quilt is like a sky without stars, but neither the quilt - nor her new life - comes easily to Frankie.

Nick Vandergriff, for instance, is the last man Frankie wants to trust. He's half-Lakota but Christian, and Frankie can see no good coming from that faith after her own parents were forced to convert at an Indian school. Can Nick convince Frankie that white men and Christians aren't all bad? And will Frankie learn that love is the most important ingredient - for her son's quilt and life itself?

Members Reviews:

Sky Without Stars Review: Broken Pieces Made Whole

Like the traditional Lakota Star quilt at the heart of this novel, the story itself is skillfully crafted of small pieces of disparate broken lives, salvaged and joined together to make a pattern not only beautiful but strong, both improbably whole and deeply comforting.

Author Linda Clare tells a powerful tale of a strong young single mother, a Lakota Indian named Frankie Chasing Bear, who finds herself stranded and alone with her 10-year-old son in the parched deserts of Arizona, in Navajo country, far from her Pine Ridge home in South Dakota.

This is no sweetly facile of love lost and found, of cultural differences easily transcended. The tensions and poverty, the rampant alcoholism and political unrest of reservation life in the 1950s are honestly portrayed. (I have lived in the Southwest most of my life, and am impressed with the subtlety and accuracy of the historical background.)

The universal questions of how one forges religious, ethnic, and personal identity in a rapidly changing world are unblinkingly faced, and thoughtfully explored.

There are many quilts in this book: the traditional Lakota star one that Frankie works on throughout as a blessing for her troubled son, the ones she helps her new Navajo friends sew to sell to tourists for the money she so desperately needs. There is also the much-damaged quilt that the âhalf-breedâ Lakota man Nickâs grandmother made for him, which Frankie mends and restores.

Whether Frankie is bravely making a new thing, a new home, from the precious remnants of her own heritage, or mending what is broken in her own and otherâs lives, she is a woman I came to admire and love, and one I shall remember for a long time.

Wonderful read

I really enjoyed this book. I was immediately drawn into the story and intrigued by the characters. The author has written a touching story about the Lakota culture and the hardships that the characters faced as they tried to build their lives while dealing with discrimination and mistrust of others around them. I certainly look forward to reading more from this author.

Hard book to follow

Out of all teh books i have bought so far in this series, this one was the hardest to read/follow. Not sure if I will read any elese that this author has written, the book just did not flow and was hard to keep my attention.

As sky without stars

A 5 star book very well written and the story was great.