Call Me the Canyon

by Creel, Ann Howard

• ISBN13: 9780976812647
• ISBN10: 0976812649
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-09-30
• Publisher: Brown Barn Books

Summary

Half-Navajo Madolen, leaves her widowed father and her canyon to see live outside and to live with a kind Mormon family. When a tragedy influences her to leave them, she returns to the canyon to make her own living as a canyon guide to a handsome young Easterner. She finds love, but it may not be what she seeks for her life; her beloved canyon calls her, as do the voices of her long-gone Navajo ancestors. A beautiful re-creation of the Glen Canyon region at a time when it was still pristine.

Author Biography

Ann Howard Creel is the author of four books for young adults, the most recent being UNDER A STAND STILL MOON. Her adult novel, THE MAGIC OF ORDINARY DAYS was presented as a Hallmark Hall of Fame television production.

Excerpts

Just after my fifteenth birthday, I packed up and rode out of the green depths of Glen Canyon, into the burnt red rocks that cracked into the Colorado River gorge and past a thousand slabs of time. On that day, just as the rivers and streams sometimes changed their courses, so did I.

I did not think I would miss my father's cabin in the side canyon he'd claimed as his own before I was born. I did not think I would miss the cattails and cottonwoods or the creek and their sounds that had always soothed me to sleep.

When I had met Sister Louisa Olsen at Dandy Crossing, she had stepped down from her wagon and shown me a book. I'd seen a book only once before when the railroad engineer, Stanton, had come through when I was seven. All those tiny figures in straight lines across the page were, to me, a curled and looped art form that only the wise could decipher. Sister Louisa Olsen had promised me an education if I left with her. Then she gave me a nice blue dress, nearly new, and I didn't hesitate to promise I'd go, even though my father knew nothing about it.