Useful Girl

Out on the western plains, two paths cross: those of a young woman running away from home and a Cheyenne girl running for her life. They're both on a heroic quest, though more than a hundred years separate their journeys.

After her mother's sudden death, Erin Douglass is virtually alone in the world. When she witnesses the exhumation of a Cheyenne girl along the side of a dirt road, life in her Montana town indelibly changes. The girl's remains, gently wrapped in a faded army coat, with silver thimbles on her right hand, are more than a hundred years old. Though her father makes every attempt to keep the discovery quiet, Erin is haunted by questions: How did this young girl end up here, in the middle of nowhere, with no marker and all alone? Who was she?

Together with Charlie White Bird, a young member of her father's road crew from the nearby reservation, Erin is determined to protect her burial ground. She and Charlie meet in secret, knowing that their encounters could threaten their divided communities. But as their commitment to their cause becomes more passionate, so, too, does their relationship. When Erin is faced with a crisis she feels she must bear alone, she runs away. With her mother's old suitcase and her granddad's journals on the Indian wars, she sets out, and as she moves farther from home, the Cheyenne girl's story vividly unfolds in her mind, guiding her toward another way out of her predicament.

Sweeping and evocative, Useful Girl reminds us that the past, no matter how deeply buried, is never far from view. It is a testament to the power of the imagination and a novel of heartrending beauty.

From School Library JournalAdult/High School–In this introspective successor to The Curve of the World (Algonquin, 2002), Stevens weaves together the journeys of a contemporary Montana teen and an 1870s Cheyenne girl. Erin, now in her 20s, has decided that it's time to tell her six-year-old daughter, Rose, how she met Rose's father, Charlie White Bird. The rest of the story unfolds in flashback. Erin, a 17-year-old still raw from her mother's death and her father's distance, doesn't know what to feel when her father's construction company unearths the bones of a Cheyenne girl. Erin and Charlie's romance unfolds, alternating and sometimes too neatly dovetailing with her imagined story of the girl, whom she calls Mo'é'ha'e. As Erin struggles to deal with being a white girl in love with a Native American, Mo'é'ha'e gradually overcomes her hatred for a captured white boy. Erin and Mo'é'ha'e both run from their circumstances–Erin with her estranged father and Charlie in pursuit, and Mo'é'ha'e and her camp barely ahead of invading soldiers during the Indian Wars. While the novel sometimes sacrifices plot for character and the narrative is clumsy at times, with occasional jarring point-of-view shifts, the landscape and culture of Montana, both past and present, are conveyed so beautifully and completely that they become another character. Teens will relate to Erin's dilemma and will get caught up in Mo'é'ha'e's tragic life, but, unless they are historical fiction fans, may be left cold by the battle scenes.–Charli Osborne, Oxford Public Library, MI Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From BooklistIn his ambitious second novel, Stevens (The Curve of the World, 2002) tells an affecting story of the power of young love, intertwining it with a less effective subplot on Native American oppression. When a construction crew uncovers the remains of a Cheyenne girl, the foreman, anxious about deadlines, orders his men to keep working. Charlie White Bird is not willing to overlook this breach in regulations, and he enlists the foreman's daughter, Erin Douglass, in his quest to rebury the remains in a sacred place. Erin, still grieving the recent death of her mother and unable to draw her reticent father into any meaningful conversation, finds in her passionate relationship with Charlie an outlet for her repressed emotions. In parallel with this contemporary love story, Stevens re-creates the life of the young Cheyenne girl and the circumstances that led to her death; unfortunately, this subplot is mired in some too-obvious symbolism. Still, this novel is well worth reading for its evocative depiction of first love and its realistic portrait of a strained father-daughter relationship. Joanne WilkinsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved