Heart Chants, is now available for Kindle users. Don't have a Kindle? You can get a
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Pre-release reviews for Heart Chants were very favorable:
Bernina Gray
Navajo artist
Heart Chants is an intricately woven tale around the life,
tradition, and wonders of the Diné people. It leaves you wanting to unravel
more stories behind the people, place and creation of it all.
Richard Sutton
(Direct reservation trader since 1985 in authentic Navajo
art)
Master storyteller Randy Attwood scores again. This time,
he’s traced an unexpected, jarring intersection of cultures and bruised mental
states that lead the reader into the deepest shadows. Beliefs can sustain a
people when all else fails. Sometimes, belief must be tempered with
understanding. When that is lacking, evil seeps in. Heart Chants illustrates
how even evil done for reasons of restoring harmony is simply, evil. His evocative
descriptions of Southwestern vistas and his detail rich research into the
Navajo culture pay back in an absorbing reading experience.
Sean Bennick
(Seattle area writer)
Reading Heart Chants has made me want to read the rest of
Phillip McGuire's exploits.
From the first sentence we sense... something unsettling and
other worldly. Randy Attwood paints a picture for the reader simply but
expertly. His dialog has you hovering over the shoulders of the characters.
Where some authors leave you as an observer, Randy involves the reader -
drawing them in deeply from the start.
He builds the relationship between his characters with the
same delicate strokes and soft colors he uses to create the setting. You learn
about Phil through injuries of exploits unseen and it's almost perfect. I say
almost because I don't think Phil would like anything to be perfect. I think
that would piss him off.
The story reads easy, and moves at a good pace. There are
elements of Noir Fiction as things move forward, and I found myself enjoying a
genre I had long ago abandoned.
We are involved in both the richness of the Navajo culture
and the intrigue of the Chinese Political Environment of the late '80s. For
both, be prepared to do a little research to fill in some blanks, it will
improve your understanding greatly.
As in real life, some people are who they seem and others
aren't. The characters grow and question the world around them, finding
connections between their lives and between monsters both real and mythical.
Most importantly, Randy honors the voices of his characters and their culture
in a way few can match. The result is a mini education of the Navajo people
from disparate viewpoints.
More than most authors, Randy Attwood puts you in the
setting. You find yourself walking through the lands of Navajo, and exploring
the town of Lawrence, Kansas. Again I'll avoid any more detail than this so you
can explore and experience the settings on your own.
The ending, while not the one I expected, was satisfying and
somehow, well there's no other word for it, perfect. Sorry, Phil - but
sometimes things are perfect, even when they aren't.
Just remember, Coyote is a trickster and the magic of the
ancient world is real.
Steve Glassman
Reviewer for Midwest Review of Books
(Here's a review
of Attwood's second mystery novel. In it he does the unthinkable--he writes a
Hillerman-like mystery set among the Navajo--and he stays even with Hillerman
and even exceeds him in the ethnology, hard as that is to believe. This is a
heck of a book. I have left much of the hyperbole out of the review in order to
keep the review from sounding as though it was written by a PR man.)
Randy Attwood has done a gutsy thing. He has gone up against
the legacy of Tony Hillerman in the second novel of his Philip McGuire crime
series. Even better he wins the bet, not because his crime novel is better than
any of Hillerman’s, although it might be and probably is, but because he has
the good sense to play off Hillerman in a totally novel way.
The action in Attwood’s novel is set in the Midwest in the
outlying Kansas City suburb of Lawrence. Some may know the burg as the seat of
the University of Kansas Jayhawks, but it is also home to Haskell Indian
College. Philip McGuire, the novel’s main viewpoint character and protagonist,
has settled there after a short career as a foreign correspondent which
culminated in his being taken hostage, his hand mutilated, and then released by
the Hezbollah in Lebanon right after they blow up the Marine base in the early
1980s. McGuire retains his intrigue of
foreign things. His love interest in the novel is the lovely Chinese activist
Hsu Chi. Yes, Chinese in a novel that
delves more deeply into Navajo cosmology than any Hillerman novel I’m familiar
with ever went.
The bad guy, and wow is he ever a bad guy, is a Navajo half
caste, who comes to Lawrence to live with and then assassinate his birth
mother. He builds a hogan inside the barn on his mom’s place after he inherits
the property, and takes a job as janitor at Haskell Junior College. There is a
deep method to this plan. He had been raised in the Southwest and had been
trying since his youth to become a full-blooded Navajo in spirit. As a
byproduct his spiritual quest, he fervently believes, will also drive the white
man from Navajo land. At Haskell he finds three Navajo coeds whose Navajo
connections and gruesome deaths and gory dismemberment (and cannibalization)
will complete the black magic ritual he had started in the Southwest. At this
point, the usefulness to the general reader of some familiarity with Navajo
ritual thanks to Hillerman novels should be apparent.
Two of the coeds are indeed abducted and ritually slain. In
an unrelated subplot McGuire’s Chinese love interest is made off with by red
Chinese agents, and almost immediately afterwards so is the third Navajo girl.
A Navajo tribal policeman arrives in Lawrence to investigate the
disappearances. Though interesting enough in his way, this cop is no rival to
Hillerman’s twin protagonists. He resembles nothing so much as a dutiful
nightclub bouncer. The investigation tool he brings along to find the girls
goes one up on Hillerman. It’s an elderly seer known only by the reverend
old-age title of Hosteen. He knows not a word of English and is guided only by
his knowledge of Navajo ways.
Attwood pulls the various storylines and conceptual elements
together in a most satisfying and compelling conclusion. If you like hardboiled
mysteries or Hillerman or novels with multi-ethnic subplots, this is a book for
you.
Katy Sozaeva
Top 1000 Amazon reviewer
My Thoughts: This book provides a peek into the legends and
lore of the Diné, or as they are commonly known, the Navajo. Their creation
story is beautiful.
“In the beginning was the wind. And when the earth came, the
wind cared for it. And when the darkness came, the wind breezed across it
beautifully. And when the dawn came and laid its lightness over the darkness,
We, the People, were created. And the wind kissed our faces.”
Phil McGuire's portion of the story focuses on two young
women—Hsu Chi and Zonnie—whom he takes in to try to protect, Hsu Chi from
anti-democratic Chinese gangs, and Zonnie from whoever or whatever has taken
away two of her friends, also Navajo, from their college. Attwood has obviously
done a great deal of research into the Diné culture, legends and lore and shows
the reader exactly how beautiful that culture was, and how much the European
settlers destroyed in their hubris. I do not know if there are any reparations
to be made for the damage we did to the native cultures here, but I find it
been heartbreaking how much knowledge has been lost. It would behoove us to
find those who have kept this knowledge and preserve it before it is gone
forever.
I found the talk Ko-yo-teh had with the old man at the
filling station very funny, especially when the old man repeated the message he
had sent to the moon in Navajo: “Watch out for these guys; they come to take
your land.” Sad, of course, but also very funny. It fits in with the overall
theme of the book, which is well represented by this quote:
“I'm convinced the deepest passion mankind has is the need
to inflict belief on another person. Belief in God, belief in these words as
God's words, belief in this interpretation of these words, belief in these acts
in the name of God. If it's not religion, it's politics.”
Like all of Randy Attwood's stories, this one is absolutely
amazing. I kept having goose bumps from reading it. Highly recommended for
those who enjoy a good story, especially if you are interested in Native
American stories and culture.
Synopsis: Burnt-out foreign correspondent Phillip McGuire, who gave up
journalism, is now happy owning and running a bar in Lawrence, Kansas. He's
happy with his new house in the country. But he's not happy. When two Navajo
female students are missing from Haskell Indian college, he agrees to shelter a
third. And then a mysterious beautiful Chinese woman stumbles into his life.
And all the while, Coyote is working on the largest sandpainting ever created
and advancing his plan to reopen the gates to the Navajo's Holy People.
