Drowning in Fire
"As a young boy growing up inside the Muskogee Creek Nation in rural Oklahoma, Josh experiences a yearning he cannot tame. Quiet and skinny and shy, he feels out of place, at once enflamed and ashamed by his attraction to other boys. Driven by a need to understand himself and his history, Josh struggles to reconcile the conflicting voices he hears - from the messages of sin and scorn of the non-Indian Christian churches his parents attend in order to assimilate, to the powerful stories of his older Creek relatives, which have been the center of his upbringing, memory, and ongoing experience.". "In his fevered and passionate dreams, Josh catches a glimpse of something that makes the Muskogee Creek world come alive. Lifted by his great-aunt Lucille's tales of her own wild girlhood, Josh learns to fly back through time, to relive his people's history and uncover a hidden legacy of triumphs and betrayals, ceremonies and secrets, he can forge into a new sense of himself.". "When, as a man, Josh rediscovers the boyhood friend who had first stirred his desires, he realizes a transcendent love that helps take him even deeper into the Creek world he has explored all along in his imagination."--BOOK JACKET.