Useful Girl : A Novel

This evocative novel ';weaves together the journeys of a contemporary Montana teen and an 1870s Cheyenne girl' (School Library Journal). After her mother's sudden death, Erin Douglass is virtually alone in the world. When she witnesses the exhumation of a Cheyenne girl along the side of a dirt road, life in her western town indelibly changes. The girl's remains, gently wrapped in a faded army coat, with silver thimbles in her right hand, are more than a hundred years old. Though her father, the construction foreman, makes every attempt to keep the discovery quiet, Erin is haunted by questions: How did this young girl end up here, in the middle of nowhere, with no marker and all alone? Who was she? Together with Charlie White Bird, a young member of her father's road crew from the nearby reservation, Erin is determined to protect the burial ground. She and Charlie meet in secret, knowing that their encounters could threaten their divided communities. But as their commitment to their cause becomes more passionate, so, too, does their relationship. When Erin is faced with a crisis she feels she must bear alone, she runs away. With her mother's old suitcase and her granddad's journals on the Indian wars, she sets out. As she moves farther from home, the Cheyenne girl's story vividly unfolds in her mindguiding her toward another way out of her predicament.