Leander West Highlights the Rising Journey of a Teenage Indigenous Actor in New Feature Story

KISSIMMEE, FL – Cody Greystone is shy, Indigenous and seventeen when a casting director from a major independent film decides he is the one. He is from Northern California. He has never been famous. Within a year he will be adored by strangers, hated by strangers, and left holding a question no one in the industry is prepared to answer for him: which parts of himself is he allowed to keep?

That question drives Two-Spirit Rising, the debut novel from author Leander West, out now in hardcover, paperback and ebook. It is a coming-of-age story that follows a young Native actor through the extremes of public life and into a reckoning with grief, violence, love and the identity he was never given permission to claim. It is a book about fame, but it is not about celebrity. It is about what is left of a person after the world is finished describing him.

West wrote it to put two communities on the same page, American Indigenous people and the LGBTQ+ community, and to sit with the prejudice that still follows both.

“I wanted to highlight and give importance to American Indigenous people and the LGBTQ+ community while bringing attention to the challenges they continue to face in today’s society.” – LEANDER WEST, AUTHOR

THE PREMISE

Cody’s casting is the opportunity of a lifetime and the beginning of the pressure that nearly ends him. As his career climbs, so does the scrutiny. His identity and his right to represent it become public property, debated by people who have never met him. Admiration and hatred arrive in the same week, from the same audience.

Inside that noise, he finds one quiet thing worth keeping: a musician named Kevin, and the first love that feels like it belongs to him rather than to the story being told about him.

Then the novel turns. Cody survives a violent act of hatred and a devastating loss, and the young man who walks out the other side does not recognize himself. His father, Kai, becomes the ground under him. When Kai is diagnosed with cancer and does not survive it, Cody is forced into the confrontation the book has been building toward, with mortality, with grief and with the unglamorous work of growing up anyway.

What he rebuilds himself with is the spine of the book: Kevin, his father’s memory, the spirit of the character he played, and finally his Two-Spirit identity, claimed on his own terms. The novel’s emotional peak arrives at the Pride and Peace Conference, in a speech West calls his favorite chapter and the heart of the novel, where Cody chooses truth and love over hate, and turns what happened to him into the Pink Feather Project.

THE PINK FEATHER

One image recurs from the first act to the last. The pink feather is the novel’s argument in a single object: that in the worst hours there is still a reason to keep going, and that hope is not a feeling you wait for but a thing you look for.

“Hope is our pink feather. As long as we have hope, we can move the world. Always look for the pink feather.” – LEANDER WEST, AUTHOR

It is also the thesis of the book’s ending. Two-Spirit Rising does not argue that trauma is survivable in the abstract. It argues that survival alone was never the goal.

“Survival in life is not enough. We are meant to rise, to love openly, and to claim the life we deserve.” – LEANDER WEST, AUTHOR

THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY

The novel began with a real career and a stranger’s face. After watching Call Me by Your Name, West found himself less interested in the film than in what happened next to Timothée Chalamet, the speed of the rise, the size of the audience, the weight of coming of age while several million people watched. He started asking what that does to a young performer who is still deciding who he is.

The second half of the book came from thirty years in Arizona. Through meaningful relationships with Indigenous individuals, West came to understand both the depth of Native cultural heritage and the discrimination and historical injustice that have never stopped. He saw the same architecture in the prejudice aimed at the LGBTQ+ community, and wrote a novel that puts the two in the same room, with compassion, respect and hope rather than argument.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Leander West is a retired church music director, an accomplished pianist, a voice teacher and a writer whose background runs through music and theatre. He has written on music for newsletters and magazines and previously authored a children’s church play. He brings creative writing study, a theatrical ear for how people actually speak, and a lifelong appetite for storytelling to a soul-stirring first novel about identity, authenticity and the strength of the human spirit.

WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR

Readers who want fiction that takes identity seriously without turning it into a lecture. Readers of literary coming-of-age novels who are looking for Indigenous and LGBTQ+ voices at the center rather than the margin. Anyone who has been told who they are by people who never asked.

Two-Spirit Rising makes a plain case: identity is not defined by society’s expectations but by the courage to live truthfully and speak with conviction. Trauma can cling to a person. It does not get to name them. And in finding one voice, the novel suggests, a person finds the power to change more than one life.

SUGGESTED INTERVIEW ANGLES

Leander West is available for interviews, features and podcast appearances. Suggested angles:

▪ The cost of overnight fame on a performer who is still figuring out who he is.

▪ Two-Spirit identity, and why so few readers have encountered the term in fiction.

▪ What thirty years in Arizona taught a non-Native writer about writing Indigenous characters with care.

▪ Grief as a coming-of-age event, and why the father has to die for the son to stand up.

▪ The Pink Feather Project, and turning private survival into public work.

BOOK DETAILS

Media Contact
Company Name: Leander West
Contact Person: Leander West
Email: Send Email
Country: United States
Website: https://www.leanderwest.com