{"product_id":"the-light-of-i-sa","title":"The Light Of Isa","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThe Light of Isa follows Riley Harlan, thirteen years old in the fall of 1988, in a small town where the streetlights have begun answering her. She was adopted at three and a half. She has no memory of anything before that, and no one in her house has ever been willing to tell her where she came from.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eBefore you begin, a word about what's in these pages. This book deals with the physical and emotional abuse of a child by an adoptive parent — a household run like a barracks, with checklists, inspections, and a paddle kept in a desk drawer. It also deals with what happens after the county gets involved and the hitting stops: a father who stays in the house and simply stops acknowledging that his daughter is in it. That second half is the part I most wanted to get right, because it leaves no marks, appears in no file, and is not against any law. It is written from inside that experience rather than at a distance from it. If that is close to your own life, please read it at whatever pace you need, or not at all right now. That decision is yours and it is a legitimate one.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThe story is fiction. Crookham is not a real town and the Harlans are not real people. But the shape of the house is drawn from life, and so is one piece of history that sits underneath the whole book.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eRiley's adoption is finalized in March of 1979. The Indian Child Welfare Act had been signed into law four months earlier, in November of 1978, after years of testimony from tribes about what had been happening to their children. Before that law, by the federal government's own accounting, somewhere between a quarter and a third of all Native children were removed from their homes, and the overwhelming majority were placed outside their families and communities — often when relatives were available and willing. ICWA was written to stop that. It did not stop it everywhere, and it did not stop it immediately, and a great many children fell through the seam between what the law required and what agencies actually did.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eRiley is one of those children. I have not invented the seam she falls through. I have only put a girl in it.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThe Nunnehi are real in the sense that matters here: they are part of Cherokee oral tradition, recorded by James Mooney in the 1890s from Cherokee speakers and carried in families long before and long after that. They are the immortals — the people who live anywhere — and the stories say that when the people were forced west, some of them went ahead so that the people would not arrive in an empty country. I have used them carefully and only where I could stand behind what I put on the page. Where this book invents, it invents around them and not on top of them.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIf you or someone you know is being hurt at home, the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline is 1-800-422-4453, and someone answers it at every hour of the day and night.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThank you for going with Riley. She is not fragile and she does not need protecting. She needs someone to know the whole of it.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eLilith Lane\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Axiom \u0026 Ash","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53959845576980,"sku":"LL-ISA-EPUB","price":6.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1030\/0162\/0756\/files\/IMG-5162.jpg?v=1788879631","url":"https:\/\/axiom-and-ash.com\/products\/the-light-of-i-sa","provider":"Axiom \u0026 Ash","version":"1.0","type":"link"}