Navajo Summer Book

Navajo Summer (P) At the age of twelve, the author put a change of clothes into a backpack, hitched a ride to the bus station, and headed out on her own for Navajo country. Her family was falling apart, and she ran away to the place she felt safest. Now, over forty years later, she has woven the events of that summer into a fictionalized memoir. Young Jamie stays with the Wilsons, a Navajo family she knows from horse-trading trips with her father. The Wilsons react to her arrival first with surprise and then warm acceptance. During the course of the summer, Jamie takes part in a Blessingway ceremony, accepts a challenge from a Navajo girl for a horseback race, and develops a friendship with Jake, the Wilson son closest to her in age. The first-person narrative depicts Jamie's love of the southwestern landscape as well as the inner workings of her mind. Ms. Dewey has written a powerfully moving novel that captures a child's courage in the face of deep personal sadness as well as a single-minded determination to find a sense of peace and wholeness in the world.

Upset at her parents' impending divorce, twelve-year-old Jamie runs away from home to live with a Navajo family that she befriended on earlier trips to the desert country with her father.