Yay! I'm glad you enjoy them. I love the way she values bareness and self-reliance, and the ways she shows people whose perspectives have dangerously skewed.

There’s also a stark but compassionate portrait of a native community looking uncertainly into the future and drinking itself to sleep every night...

Beautiful. Yes, exactly.

I should maybe warn you that in one of the latest ones, she apparently kills off a major character rather than actually work out a complicated relationship in the making — my mom (who led me to these) was disturbed enough by it to warn me, which she never does.