In STEALING, Pulitzer Prize finalist Margaret Verble turns her skewering gaze on the life of a Cherokee child who is removed from her family in the 1950s.

Karen “Kit” Crockett has lived alone with her father for almost as long as she can remember, the dying days of her tuberculosis-ridden mother buried under the naivety of youth. Although Kit's aunts and uncles pester her father to give her to them in exchange for a lighter load, a well-rounded family and an education for her, he has held strong, letting her run the house while he tends to the fields and works. But Kit is not like every other child in town: her mother was Cherokee, while her father is white. Although she can pass for white, she bears the high cheekbones, intuition and prejudices of her community.

"Though short in length, STEALING packs a major punch with its voice-driven narrator, its dual-meaning play on the title, and its long-overdue unpacking of the Christian missionary attempts on Indigenous cultures in the United States."

In the years following her mother’s death, Kit befriends beautiful Bella, who inhabits the former home of her Uncle Joe. Bella is young, brown and lithe. She runs her own house, but her every expense is funded by her two white boyfriends, who use and abuse her at their whims. As Kit starts to find companionship in Bella, a dangerous dance between white men --- and their prejudices, fears and hatreds --- and the Indigenous citizens who first owned their farmlands comes to a head.

When we meet Kit, she is attending Ashley Lordard, a religious boarding school for both poor white kids and every variety of Indigenous child. What should be considered a salvation has become a strange, dark prison. She witnesses girls’ hair being shorn, their identifying names stripped and replaced with white placeholders like “Linda” and “Susan,” and entire families are forgotten for not stepping in line with the lord.

Kit has been raised to find, if not the lord, religion in the world around her --- the women who provide natural remedies for illnesses, the men who rescue their brethren from unwarranted policing, or even the friendships formed over shared food. In Ashley Lordard, however, all she finds is sexual abuse, unrealistic and inconsistent indoctrination, and an isolation that stops her breath.

The power of Kit’s story comes not from the horrors to which she is now exposed, but in her reminiscences of her home before --- how her growing mind identifies the differences between the real, true love and community she found there and the forced ideas of love that she is shown at Ashley Lordard. In these dissonances, the real theme of the novel comes to life as Kit reveals how she ended up at this school and plots her escape.

Though short in length, STEALING packs a major punch with its voice-driven narrator, its dual-meaning play on the title, and its long-overdue unpacking of the Christian missionary attempts on Indigenous cultures in the United States. What’s most shocking about Verble’s narrative is the sickening realization of how very easy it is to convince people of the “otherness” of their neighbors and the need for their conformity.

Kit’s voice is singular and pure, as strong as that of THE GIRL WITH THE LOUDING VOICE and WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING. But while these books unfold in real time, STEALING is told in past tense, with Kit reflecting on her most childish moments while still a child herself. Although she somehow retains hope through it all, readers are truly put through the ringer as the realizations of what she is enduring become frighteningly real and horrifying.

Vivid and immediate, passionate and meticulously researched, STEALING is magnetic and unforgettable, unflinching and searing. Readers of WINTER COUNTS, ALL GIRLS and THE NICKEL BOYS will be stunned and stupefied by this courageous, thoughtful account.