Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea

Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea by Glancy, Diane. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9781585673650.

In Stone Heart, Diane Glancy grippingly retells the story of American legend Sacajawea, the young Shoshoni woman who traveled with Lewis and Clark on their expedition to the West. Presented in Sacajawea’s voice in the form of a diary, the book makes moving and illuminating fiction out of a famed piece of history that has long been masked by myth. Glancy adds breadth and immediacy to the story by juxtaposing excerpts from Lewis and Clark’s diaries with her brilliantly imagined journal of Sacajawea. Lewis and Clark recorded the external journey; its physical challenges and its wonders. Glancy’s Sacajawea experiences the expedition on a different plane, one in which the dream of a small white stone shaped like a beaver is emblematic of the thin membrane between the worlds of the mundane and the magical. Sacajawea hears the clouds talking, feels the thunderous hooves of ghost horses, and savors the wetness where a buffalo calf licks her arm from the other side. In Stone Heart, the Lewis and Clark Trail springs back to life in a stunning work of imagination that vividly depicts the day-to-day tasks, ordeals, and triumphs of the famed expedition. At once a trail uncovered and a life revealed, Stone Heart draws a lingering portrait of a woman of resilience and courage.