In Amanda Skenandore’s provocative debut, set in the tragic intersection between white and Native cultures, a girl whose father runs a “savage-taming” boarding school in the late-19th century learns about friendship, betrayal, and the sacrifices made in the name of belonging. Exploring the devastation and hope wrought by the US Government’s policy of forced assimilation in the years after the Indian Wars, Between Earth and Sky is told seen through the eyes of Alma, a white girl who falls in love with a Native American boy at the boarding school they both attend. It’s a tale of friendship, racism, and cultural identity—a journey of atonement that bears the reader from the 1880s to 1900, when the school’s brightest and most celebrated graduate stands trial for the murder of a white man.