The novel delves into the domain of the foster care system in how troubled kids navigate the different aspects of their past and present. Moreover, it explores the social sphere of Native Americans specifically the younger populace trying to find their identity and place in society. Told from the perspective of an adult about his younger self, the narrative focuses on themes that have an emotional impact on teenagers such as early abandonment, identity, and sexual awakening.
The narrative follows a fifteen-year-old named Sequoyah from the Cherokee Nation Tribe who is displaced and put under foster care. Akin to the other kids, Sequoyah has trauma mostly inflicted by his parents who include an absent father and a negligent mother. At the foster home, he finds other troubled teens but Rosemary catches his eye and they instantly develop a deeper connection. Hobson explores this transformative time for an individual where the struggle with identity is a huge part. He showcases the complex emotions of a teenager with emotional and physical trauma laboring to find a sense of belonging in the world. As an adult, the protagonist pinpoints the repression of emotions exhibited at that age that may only manifest years later.
Brian Evenson of The Open Curtain reviewed “Where the Dead Sit Talking is a tender and unflinching look at shell-shocked young lives as they try in the eddies of foster care to keep their heads above water. Hobson writes with a humane authority but without giving his characters any alibis. What we have instead is a careful look at what it means to be physically and psychically scarred, abandoned by parents, Native American in a white world, haunted by death, and on the verge of becoming an adult.”
