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Nora Pierce reads from her debut novel The Insufficiency of Maps, an unsentimental, Quechen coming-of-age story. In Pierce's forceful debut, Alice is five when she and her homeless, mentally ill mother, Amalie (Mami, she calls her), arrive at Papi's trailer in an Arizona Indian reservation to live. Papi, a heavy-drinking itinerant laborer, may or may not be Alice's father, but he adores Amalie (who is of Kwytz'an descent) and has been waiting for her to return after years of medication and hospitalization-related absence.

Afflicted with a skin ailment and subsisting largely on French fries, Alice briefly attends the local reservation school before her mother's visions and paranoia prompt them to hitchhike back to Amalie's father's home in California. Amalie's mental condition worsens, along with Grampa's untreated diabetes: one, then the other is hospitalized, leaving Alice in foster care.

At 13, Alice wants to fit in with her white American foster family and at the school she attends; but while foster sister Anne takes ballet classes, Alice is encouraged to learn bead-making and Indian dances. But the pull of her heritage is strong, and Alice and the other Quechen (or Native) characters that Pierce introduces grapple to overcome difficult legacies in this unsentimental coming-of-age story.