A review by melgonzalez
Looks Over by Rose Christo

5.0

Real people. Real people had died in the most horrific ways imaginable. It wasn't just a story. Their scars were passed down generation to generation; and the blood they had spilled was the blood running in our veins.

I'M SO CONFLICTED ABOUT THIS. And you might say: Mel, you gave this book five stars, what are you conflicted about and why is the rating not showing that? Hey, I can recognise that my favourites have flaws and can give me headaches because I can't figure out if things are okay or not or I can ask myself why the authors decided to go one way and not the other and THEY CAN STILL BE MY FAVOURITES. As long as they are not harmful and we talk about these things so we can get to a conclusion and as long as we don't pretend they are perfect, these books can still touch your heart like this book did for me. The problem is that I can't tell you what I'm conflicted about without spoiling you so, sorry about that. Let's get this out of the way so I can gush about how beautiful this book is:

So, in this book we find out Sky is not actually the son of who he thought was his father all along (and of course, he's still his father, they're just not related by blood). This means that he is not Native American. Do we really need another story about a white kid though? I mean, like you probably can see I adore these books but I was disappointed that we wouldn't see the perspective we were expecting. I keep thinking about a Native American kid reading this and being happy of seeing themselves in the page and then realising it's another story about a white kid. I don't know if this was wrong (nor right) to do exactly, because Sky is very aware of his privileges, as we see in the other books, he doesn't even want to accept a scholarship for being Native American because he's not. I'm just confused as to why this storyline was necessary. I guess we could see how blood doesn't really matter and how this community accepted him anyway because he's family. His perspective changes a bit but he's still part of this community and we get a Native American and a Shoshone story and we can learn so much about it. Like I said, I'm not saying this is wrong or right. I'm just confused.

This book was absolutely gorgeous, even better than the first one. It presented so many topics and called out the systemic and social oppression Native Americans have to live with every day of their lives. Especially how this system caters towards the violence against them and how the ones in power or the ones with more privilege get to do whatever they want with their people and they can get away with it because of the objectification of Native people. And when I'm talking about objectification I'm talking about how they were literally treated like property, objects and not people. How their claims were ignored and how white people took children from their parents and nobody did anything to stop them. The system actually cooperated with this. There was a lot of social commentary. We also see how impoverished they became because of how the government was stealing their resources and their way of living. There were a lot of stories about identity and heritage that we got to see in the first book as well but in this book it went much deeper.

There's a lot of violence towards minorities and we know that. Especially from the government and the law and how unprotected minority groups are by them. But the reality is that we barely hear these stories about Indigenous people and all the injustices towards them. You need to read this book if you want to know more about it. And in reality, we could just inform ourselves. These books are now a few years old so I don't know how much of these things have changed. But I'm sure the injustices and institutional oppression is still happening as we can see with North Dakota and we need to do research about those things and boost them. I'm not saying this book is perfect, like I said before. It had some things that I still question. For example, there were a lot of descriptions of olive skin as "exotic". But I gave it five stars because this book in particular and the series in general is touching my heart and it's making me learn so much, that I just can't not support it.