THE CRYING ROCKS

Joelle stands out, and it’s embarrassing. At 13, she’s already 5’9” and still growing, she looks nothing like her adoptive parents or like kids at school, and now students are spreading the rumor that she’s a lost royal princess. Carlos, a boy at school, tells Joelle she looks like the Indian girl in a painting on the library wall and, on hikes through the woods, Carlos relates the history of the lost Narragansett Indians, killed off 50 years after the Pilgrims arrived. Joelle’s search for her own past, her Native American ancestry, and her place in family and community make a complex and engaging story. Lisle neatly weaves in the history of the Narragansetts through Carlos’s stories and Joelle’s reading of first settlers’ diaries and journals. With plenty of family secrets to go around, visions from Joelle’s “Indian imagination,” and the mystery of the Crying Rocks, there’s plenty here to captivate readers. (Fiction. 12+)