ESCAPE TIME!  with KC Heath

THE BONE WHISTLE
Eva Swan
Juno Books 2007
Pb 201 pages
ISBN#  13: 978-0-8095-5792-9
ISBN# 10: 0-8095-5792-4
 

This is a Young Adult, fast-easy read aimed at females who like a story based on the Here And Now where magic visits but you can still come home again afterwards if you want to. 

Darly is twenty years old and lives in Denver with her mother.  She’s never known her father.  It’s summer vacation from college, so Mom’s taking Darly on their usual trip up to the Sioux Indian Reservation where Grandpa Jake runs “a little pop-shop just off the last highway in Nebraska” before South Dakota.  Darly’s always considered this annual trip a bore, and is even announcing with this visit that it’s going to be her last.  But her mother loves this desolate place, for some strange reason.  And then there’s the bone whistle.  Jake gives it to Darly with instructions: “Just be careful with it. Don’t use it unless you mean it. And don’t let your mom see it neither.”  O-kay.  Grandpa Jake’s acting weird again, but that’s nothing new.  Darly pockets the whistle then forgets about it until one day she’s walking out in the hills alone and encounters a rattler.  Frightened, Darly pulls out the whistle and blows on it, hoping her mother will hear and come running.  What appears is not her mother, but a stranger who pulls Darly into a magical realm where the mystery of her ancestry is revealed.