There’s a parallel world I only fleetingly glimpsed as a child, even though my own little Beaver Cleaverville was surrounded by Indian reservations and woven through with children with brown hair and brown skin.

It wasn’t until I was an adult, and reading the novels of native writers, that I truly began to enter that parallel world. It occurred to me then that some of my Indian classmates must have been hiding in plain sight. This week, author and filmmaker Sherman Alexie turned that idea around. After reading his latest book, “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” I finally realized how my classmates must have really felt: brutally ignored in full view.

On Tuesday, Alexie visited Havermale High School in Spokane’s West Central neighborhood, where native students in the Medicine Wheel Academy echoed his stories of loneliness, poverty and racism.

Alexie’s young adult novel, which was nominated for a National Book Award earlier this month, tells the thinly disguised story of his teen years. In it, a character named Arnold Spirit leaves the Spokane Indian Reservation to attend a better school in Reardan, “the whitiest, white place in the history of white places.”

Alexie’s poignant tales and wild humor convey the love and defeat of the reservation. He writes of the isolation, the Christmases without presents and the far-too-frequent funerals. He describes loving parents who are always there for him, yet struggle with the effects of alcohol and poverty.

One particularly searing scene conveys the reality of growing up poor.

Arnold Spirit’s dog, Oscar, becomes critically ill. And slowly it dawns on Arnold that, because his parents lack the money to pay a veterinarian, Oscar has another fate. Arnold’s father asks him to carry the dog outside. And there, under the family’s apple tree, the father aims his rifle at Oscar.

On Tuesday the Medicine Wheel students asked if that story was true. Yes, Alexie said, “that story actually happened. That was my dog Oscar.”

The students moaned, “Ooohhh.”

Sixteen-year-old Katrina (“Like-The-Hurricane”) Dyer told me later she had the same experience. When she was 6 ½, her gray cat, Smokey, fell ill, and there was no money for her care. Her sister wound up hitting Smokey over the head with a baseball bat.

“I felt the way he felt,” Dyer said. “Why would you kill something so beautiful to me? Why would you kill my best friend?”

Other students recognized their own stories in Alexie’s book. One boy relates to the description of Arnold as the isolated book-worm basketball player, another lived in a trailer with no running water, yet another remembers punching a classmate for making a racist remark.

But, just as Alexie found hope at Reardan High School, the Medicine Wheel students find it at their school. Here students learn the Salish language, take drumming classes and go for campouts to dig for camas root. Dyer, a poet, was earning one D and 5 F’s when she left her old school. Now she’s earning all A’s and B’s.

Three of them, sociology students, told me what they’ve learned in their class: People should judge others not on ascribed status, things they have no control over like race, gender and skin color, but on their achieved status, the decisions they make and the actions they take.

Alexie told them about traveling all over the world, which he’s discovered is filled with brown people. He’s seen the pyramids in Egypt, walked on the Great Wall in China and spotted another Spokane Indian at a pub in London. “Junior?” the conversation went. “Chubby?”

Around the world, he finds people fascinated by American Indians. “People love us,” he told the students. “They think we have magical powers.”

Alexie’s book opens with a quote from W.B. Yeats: “There is another world, but it is in this one.”

I’d give anything to go back in time and hear the “Absolutely True Diaries of the Real-Life Indians” I knew as a child. Fortunately, through the magical power of language, Sherman Alexie and Katrina “Like-The-Hurricane” Dyer convey the depth of our shared humanity in stories that can not be ignored.