The Listening Silence

by Phyllis Root

     This is a short J fiction book I picked up on a whim secondhand. It's about a young girl in a Native American tribe. At five years old, she's been living alone with her parents for some time. Her father leaves on a hunting trip and when he doesn't return, the mother goes out to find him. The girl Kiri waits and waits but nobody returns. A couple from another tribe comes across her tent and takes her in. She is at first shy in her new surroundings, not used to being around so many people in the new tribe. Kiri has a special ability to "put herself into the eyes of others"- I guess you would say she's an empath, able to deeply feel what others around her experience, and also to see the world through the eyes of animals. This can be useful- she can put herself into the eyes of a bird overhead and see something far off, for example. It's also hard to deal with in close quarters with other people, as when she can't avoid feeling the anger and resentment of a boy in the tribe named Garen. Seeing how disconcerted she is among others and recognizing her gift, the tribe's healer adopts her so she can live in relative seclusion in his tent, and learn his skills. But when she's asked to help him heal a sick person, she flinches away from the strong feelings of loneliness and pain that overwhelm her at the bedside. When Kiris turns thirteen, she has to go on a solitary journey to seek a spirit vision that will let her know what her purpose in life is, and her role in the tribe. She expects that it will be as a singer and healer. But she's afraid, doesn't feel ready for this responsibility. On the journey she runs into a storm and her boat is wrecked, leaving her stranded on a riverbank in unknown territory. So it turns into a survival story- how she finds food, builds a shelter, and so on. She finds an injured wolf, and tries to heal it. Then Garen shows up- he's been out on a spirit journey too, and he's hunting the wolf that she befriended. He's also half-starved and needs help. Kiri is torn between protecting her wolf companion or helping this disgruntled young man she's never really liked. Of course she does the right thing, even though it's hard- and when she finally reaches out to Garen with her healing skills, she finds to her surprise that they have something in common- a deep loneliness each has been carrying around for years.

In the end Kiri finally resolves having felt abandoned by her parents so long ago, and returns to her adopted tribe with confidence and peace. It's really a nice story with some complexity and depth of feeling I didn't expect for how short it is. I read it in one sitting. I really wished it had been twice as long- I wanted more of every aspect! There's also throughout the entire book, words like korlu and skirre which kind of threw me out of the narrative because I spent way too much time trying to figure out what they were. Every single animal in the story has a foreign word instead of English (and I have no idea if this is a real tribe depicted, or a made-up one). While there's a glossary, it doesn't say wolken- a wolf but instead wolken- an animal with slender legs, bushy tail, pointed nose, and keen eyesight and hearing. Is it a wolf? or did she befriend a fox? I just want to know and I wonder if kids would puzzle as much over this as I did, or just gloss over it and be absorbed in the story. The illustrations by Dennis McDermott are beautiful, rich with texture and detail that add a lot to the book.

Rating: 3/5            106 pages, 1992