Initiation. Virginia Frances Schwartz. Markham, ON: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2003. 268 pp, cloth, $22.95. ISBN 1-55005-053-2. Subject Headings: Kwakiutl children-Juvenile fiction. Kwakiutl Indians-Juvenile fiction. Grades 5-9 / Ages 10-14. Review by Jane Bridle. **** /4 Reviewed from uncorrected proof.

excerpt:

"This is what I know of them and nothing more.

They will be older now, but the two share the same face. Whenever they look at one another, they will sense the place they come from. Skin darkened like polished bark from living by the sea. Earth brown eyes. Straight white teeth. Cheek bones high and carved like cliff stone. Long black hair trailing down both their backs like a thick snake, flying in the wind like something wild.

They will enter a time of passage in their lives, the journey from childhood to adulthood. Their initiation.

It is a time of transit. Of secrecy. Of migration. Their lives are the thread between reality and magic.

Tightly woven like a spider's web.

Thick enough to trap the truth.

Thin enough for a story to blow through."

Nana and her twin brother Nanolatch, 11-year-old children of a chief of a Kwakiutl tribe on the Northwest Coast during the fifteenth century, are about to embark on their initiation into adulthood. While Nanolatch is destined to become the chief, Nana faces marriage to a young boy from another tribe and a life spent apart from her family.

     When their father leads a war party that destroys a neighboring village, the warriors return with a young captive, daughter of a shaman, who has a strong spiritual affinity to nature and the Spirit World. Her fate and the fate of the twins will converge, and their lives will be altered forever. When the salmon run fails to materialize, the three slip away from the village to try and discover how they can get the salmon to return to the river.

     The novel is based on a Kwakiutl transformation myth which centered on the belief that, when the salmon were scarce, a warrior could call them back by diving into the water and turning into a salmon.

     Well researched, the novel transmits a powerful sense of ancient native culture and values and an understanding of aboriginal life before European contact. The award winning author of If I Just Had Two Wings, Virginia Frances Schwartz evokes a strong reverence for natural world and makes a plea for conservation to save the endangered migrating salmon.

     Young readers will relate to the challenges of the three remarkable protagonists on the threshold of maturity who question the traditional roles their society expected them to fulfill.

Highly Recommended.

Jane Bridle is a Youth Services Librarian with the Winnipeg Public Library.

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Published by The Manitoba Library Association ISSN 1201-9364

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