Fiction - Sports & Recreation, Fiction - Miscellaneous People, Places & Cultures, Fiction - Native Americans, Native American Peoples - Fiction & Literature, Fiction - Family Life

Enchanted Runner

Name: Enchanted Runner
Author: Kimberley Griffiths Little
ISBN: 9780380976232

by Kimberley Griffiths Little

Write a review

Overview

Kendall believes in magic. He can feel it when he runs. And since his mother's death a year ago, the urge has become too big to explain. During her illness, Kendall ran to save her. Now he runs to retrieve the memory of her face. Sometimes, too, he imagines himself running like the warriors in Mom's stories, Acoma Runners returning to his mother's native pueblo tribe, to the cliffs of Acoma...Sky City...a place she promised they would visit together when he turned twelve.

As Kendall prepares for a summer-long adventure spent criss-crossing the states in his dad's semi, a letter arrives from his mother's grandfather, beckoning him to Acoma. He feels cheated, until it occurs to him that his mom might somehow be there, in Sky City. He's twelve, after all, and his mother always kept her promises.

Drawn into his great-grandfather's world of secrets and sacred ceremony, Kendall discovers that the magic he feels when he runs is a proud legacy, one linked to a way of life as ancient and mysterious as the earth itself. In the process of trying to recover his mother, Kendall reclaims his worldly and spiritual heritage, in a moving story of one boy's search for identity and belonging.

01-02 Land of Enchantment Book Award Masterlist (Gr. 6-9)

Author Biography: KIMBERLEY GRIFFITHS LITTLE lives in a solar adobe house along the Rio Grande with her husband, a robotics engineer, and their three sons. Taking walks along the towering cottonwood groves of the river banks gives her inspiration for her book ideas.

The author's favorite places are the library and her home, writing at the computer. She reads several books a week, is an excellent pianist, and likes going to the movies.

Twelve-year-old Kendall, half Anglo and half Acoma, discovers his heritage and his destiny as a runner when he visits his great-grandfather's pueblo and finds a culture he used to hear about from his deceased mother.

Reviews

There are no reviews yet. Log in to write one.

Editorials

Children's Literature - Uma Krishnaswami

Two things are an indelible part of young Kendall's life at the start of this tale--he magic of running, and the unbearable void left by his mother's death. Mom's heart before she died had been filled with a longing to return to her beloved Acoma Pueblo. It's a longing Kendall will have to try to fulfill, in his own way, in his own time. Little depicts the cliffs of Sky City with loving care. Here, Kendall discovers a part of his family, his heritage, his being, in the rhythms of a summer that ebb and flow around the stern figure of his great-grandfather Armando Abeyta.

Library Journal

Gr 4-6-The summer after his mother's death, Kendall and his brother are to travel across the U.S. with their father in his 18-wheeler. The plans change suddenly when Kendall's great grandfather summons him to "Sky City," the Acoma Indian Pueblo in New Mexico. With mixed feelings, he travels to his mother's birthplace to meet her family for the first time. The boy, half Acoma and half Anglo, is a fervent runner, compelled by inexplicable "magic" to run. He has many questions about his place in the world and his mysterious compulsion. He seeks answers from the Enchanted Mesa at Acoma, hoping to find the spirit of his mother and to earn a place in the family lineage. Although details of Acoma culture are accurate, Kendall's quest is contrived, and the action is predictable and unconvincing. Attempts to infuse the plot with mysticism are largely uninspired and the story fails to evoke imagery of the setting or empathy for its characters. Readers desiring stories of Native American quests would be better served by Michael Dorris's Sees behind Trees (Hyperion, 1996).-Carolyn Stacey, Jefferson County Public Library, Golden, CO Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

An Anglo-Indian boy finds a measure of peace in the landscape of his deceased mother's childhood, and begins to understand the source of his compulsion to run. The summer after his mother's death, Kendall is sent to visit his great-grandfather, Armando, a Native American who lives on top of a mesa, in Acoma, or Sky City; it's a largely abandoned pueblo built centuries ago, overlooking the valley that lies between it and another mesa known as the Enchanted Mesa. Kendall has always been a runner, driven by some inner spirit; he learns from Armando that he is the last in a long line of Acoma runners, men who ran as part of their belief system, and who were especially revered for their bravery and stamina. The mysterious Enchanted Mesa challenges Kendall to run as he never has before, and that kindles his curiosity about his family's past and his own destiny. He begins to understand the part of his nature that he inherited from his mother, but also realizes that he will never be accepted as a true Acoman because of the Anglo blood that is his legacy from his father. Little has composed a fine coming-of-age story; she enhances it with a lot of insight into a vanishing way of life and the need to preserve it. (Fiction. 10-12)