Reading the Bones
By Gina McMurchy-Barber

While digging a pond in the yard with her uncle, twelve-year-old Peggy Henderson realizes the rock she’s been trying to pry from the ground is really a human skull! Peggy eventually learns that her home and the entire seaside town of Crescent Beach were built on top of a five-thousand-year-old Coast Salish fishing village. With the help of an elderly archaeologist, a woman named Eddy, Peggy comes to know the ancient storyteller buried in her yard in a way few others can—by reading the bones. As life with her aunt and uncle becomes unbearable, Peggy looks to the old Salish man of the past for help and the answer to a famous poet’s question: "Why do we grope among the dry bones of the past?"