The year is 1904 on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, and eleven-year-old Tomas, the son of Swedish immigrants, thinks that life is a game of chance. Now you see it. Now you don’t. His father. School. Dreams for the future. It doesn’t matter how hard he tries or how much he hopes. In the end, everything he loves can disappear with the delivery of a telegram.
Then one hot day, on a dusty street in Bonesteel, South Dakota, he sees a tall, dark, city-slicker of a man as they both are trying their luck in a land lottery. Tomas does not know that he has just met the man who will one day write novels about his homesteading life on the Great Plains and be known as America’s first African-American feature film maker. Oscar will also become his friend and mentor.
Could it be that Tomas’s luck is changing?
Told in the classic style of Laura Ingalls Wilder and set in the vast patchwork landscape of the Great Plains, Oscar's Gift is a historical coming of age story for modern young readers.
