In Stone Heart, Diane Glancy grippingly retells the story of American legend Sacajawea, the young Shoshoni woman who traveled with Lewis and Clark on their expedition to the West. Presented in Sacajawea's voice in the form of a diary, the book makes moving and illuminating fiction out of a famed piece of history that has long been masked by myth. Glancy adds breadth and immediacy to the story by juxtaposing excerpts from Lewis and Clark's diaries with her brilliantly imagined journal of Sacajawea.
Lewis and Clark recorded the external journey—its physical challenges and wonders. Glancy's Sacajawea experiences the expedition on a different plane, one in which the dream of a small white stone shaped like a beaver is emblematic of the thin membrane between the worlds of the mundane and the magical, the realms of waking and sleeping. Sacajawea hears the clouds talking, feels the thunderous hooves of ghost horses, and savors the wetness where a buffalo calf licks her arm from the other side. Through the story of her journey, the reader touches another time.
The Lewis and Clark Trail is marked by signs and statues immortalizing Sacajawea; more than any other member of the expedition, she has been its enduring symbol and a source of contention. Although the trail has largely faded to a story told in glass beads and musket balls, fire pits and bison bones, in Stone Heart, it springs back to life in a stunning work of imagination that vividly depicts the day-to-day tasks, ordeals, and triumphs of the famed expedition. At once a trail uncovered and a life revealed, Stone Heart draws a lingering portrait of a woman of resilience and courage.
ISBN: 1-58567-514-8, Overlook Press, 2003.
Click here to purchase this book from Powells Books.
Click here to purchase this book from Amazon.com.