Debby Dahl Edwardson

Debby Dahl Edwardson is an Alaska-based writer whose fiction draws on the histories and experiences of the state’s Indigenous communities. My Name Is Not Easy follows several young people at a Catholic boarding school in the 1960s, where separation from home, institutional authority, and cultural difference shape daily life. Publishers Weekly and Kirkus both describe the novel’s multiple viewpoints and its historical Alaska setting, noting how individual stories converge within the school community. Edwardson’s approach gives no single student complete ownership of the narrative. Instead, the shifting perspectives reveal friendships, tensions, and unequal pressures that might remain hidden from one another. My Name Is Not Easy is historical fiction for younger readers, but its concerns extend beyond a school story to language, identity, family, and the power to name oneself. Edwardson builds those themes through distinct characters and concrete circumstances, allowing the period setting to emerge through experience rather than explanation alone. The result is a layered account of resilience and belonging.