CROSSING THE STARLIGHT BRIDGE

After he watches her unwrap her ninth-birthday presents, Rayanne's father announces that he's leaving the family on the Penobscot reservation in Maine and traveling west. Though she knows he's been unhappy since losing his job, Ray is completely unprepared for this shattering desertion. When she and her mother are forced by economic necessity to leave the reservation for the mainland to live with her grandmother, she's both physically and emotionally dislocated from her roots; but in the course of this small book she's able to find her equilibrium, strength enough to rail at her father when he comes around again, and, ultimately, the grace to forgive him. The scrappy but likable girl is well supported by her competent, understanding mother and grandmother. A believable and compelling portrayal of a Native American family coexisting with white society while retaining its own traditions. (Fiction. 8-12)