Thomas King explains the novel's title in The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative: "the girls had been scrubbed and powdered to look like china dolls and the boys had been scrubbed and sheared to look like porcupines"King, Thomas, The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative, (Toronto, House of Anansi, 2003), 116. One of the lines from which the title draws its name comes from Alexie writing, "No one heard the little china doll that night, but if she were given a voice, it would've sounded like a million porcupines screaming in the dark."Alexie, Robert, Porcupines and China Dolls (Toronto, Stoddart, 2002), 5.
