Reading the Bones

Short-listed for the 2009 Silver Birch Award, commended for the 2009 Best Books for Kids & Teens Due to circumstances beyond her control, 12-year-old Peggy Henderson has to move to the quiet town of Crescent Beach, British Columbia, to live with her aunt and uncle. Without a father and separated from her mother, who s looking for work, Peggy feels her unhappiness increasing until the day she and her uncle start digging a pond in the backyard and she realizes the rock she s been trying to pry from the ground is really a human skull. Peggy eventually learns that her home and the entire seaside town were built on top of a 5000-year-old Coast Salish fishing village. With the help of an elderly archaeologist, a woman named Eddy, Peggy comes to know the ancient storyteller buried in her yard in a way that few others can by reading the bones. As life with her aunt becomes more and more unbearable, Peggy looks to the old Salish man from the past for help and answers.