Lisle, Janet Taylor. The crying rocks

Kliatt, Nov, 2003 by Claire Rosser

Simon & Schuster, Atheneum. 199p. c2003. 0-689-85319-X. $16.95. JS

Lisle's previous novel for YAs, The Art of Keeping Cool, won the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction, and in The Crying Rocks, she connects the present with the past in an intriguing novel. Joelle is adopted and has been told a strange, long tale of her past by her adoptive mother: she was thrown out of a window, she came on a train to Rhode Island from Chicago, she lived in squalor by the train station until rescued. A boy in her class, Carlos, tells her she looks like an Indian, like the Narragansett Indians pictured in a mural in the town library. She is tall, with dark, straight hair, and when she sees the picture, she acknowledges a resemblance. But it is a long, winding road in this story until she uncovers the truth of her own ancestry.

She and Carlos begin treks into the forest, cutting school if necessary (they are both excellent students), trying to locate sites associated with the Narragansett Indians who lived there long before the white people arrived. One site, known as the crying rocks, is where Carlos, his father, and his brother met tragedy when the brother fell and died of his injuries. Carlos is haunted by memories of that day and it takes great strength for him to return to that place, a place associated with Indian tragedies as well. When Joelle's mother dies, tall, dark-haired Indian men attend the funeral and are introduced as Joelle's uncles--then finally the troth emerges. That truth involves the death of Joelle's twin sister, the suicide of her biological mother, and an eerie connection to Indian traditions and the crying rocks. The cover portrait of Joelle is appealing, and this will appeal to YAs who like stories of young people trying to uncover family secrets.