FernFolio

Sent to live with her aunt and uncle while her widowed mother goes to Toronto to look for a job, twelve-year old Peggy Henderson resigns herself to a summer of listening to Aunt Margaret’s endless lectures, and her determined efforts to get Peggy out and making friends with other kids.   She prefers helping Uncle Stu dig the hole in the backyard for the new koi pond to neatly folding her laundry or cleaning her bedroom, and has found all of the friendship she needs in Mrs. Hobbs, the elderly woman with whom she goes shell-hunting on the beach.
Then Peggy finds a human skull in that hole in the backyard and the police’s forensic team determines that the remains are several thousand years old.  Though her aunt is annoyed to find her koi pond has become an archaeological excavation, Peggy rapidly becomes involved in investigating and documenting the site.  She helps Eddy, the wise, comfortable and plain-speaking old archaeologist who arrives to work on the excavation, and finds herself learning more than she could possibly have imagined about the Coast Salish elder laid to rest in that hole thousands of years before.
Peggy discovers that, while Eddy and Mrs Hobbs, and others, believe that the artefacts found in these ancient burial sites ought to be preserved for study by museums and other agencies, the descendants of the elderly man want to ensure that his remains are once again laid to rest, and the owner of a local store selling native artefacts is prepared to pay cash for any interesting items that he can then turn around and sell at a profit.
Told from the perspective of Peggy, whose strong feelings and personal preoccupations help to drive the plot, Reading the Bones is a good story about a girl’s struggle to understand the past and its lessons for the present and future.
FernFolio Editor