reviewed by Bonita Crider
There’s an elusive Native American legend that goes something like this: in order to survive, either from enemy attacks or white man’s encroachment, a group of Indians disappear into a hill or cave. But they aren’t really underground, but in a different world, sort of alternate dimension in which they can continue living the old ways. It’s perhaps akin to “the people of the hill” being another name for faeries or the elves sailing west in Tolkien. It’s the old magic passing on to another place in order to continue away from the changing times.
It’s that idea that is the basic premise for Eve Swan’s The Bone Whistle. It begins with a trip. College-aged Darly is determined that this will be the last summer she spends with her mother in the old cabin on the reservation. It’s been an annual trip, but now she feels it’s time to move on with her life, leaving her mother behind. On the reservation, she gets an odd gift from her grandfather Jake: a whistle made of bone, decorated with blue feathers. It’s for her to use when she gets bored he says– but it’s also a connection to two generations of Darly’s past.
Darly uses the whistle first in desperation for help when faced with a deadly snake. The whistle brings forth a stranger who saves her and shows her briefly the world of the cave.
On her return, her mother and grandfather finally tell her that her father her grandmother came from and returned to the world she just visited. They were wanaghi, the people who lived under the hill. Determined to meet her father, and with the reluctant support of her mother, Darly blows the whistle again. This time, a different man appears and he too takes her to this other world in search of her father. It’s a world where the old ways are preserved, and men can become water or wind, women can become birds and time flows in a different direction. And perhaps Darly can find her connection to the past and her place in the world.
The story told here unique in its Indian background and use of the wanaghi legends, a refreshing change from some much European based fantasies. My only complaint is that the suddenness in which romantic feelings occur seems unnatural to me. But that’s my only complaint. Otherwise, the pacing is at once both leisurely and purposeful, giving you the space to take in this new world and tension to move the story forward. At heart despite all the magic and strangeness, it’s really about the need to know where you came from in order to find where you are going.
