Sing Down the Moon

Read this book in the car to my children as we were traveling through New Mexico to Arizona from our home in Pennsylvania. I love it when I can match a book to a travel destination and this was one of those books. As I was reading, I didn't think my kids really cared, however, once saw mesas and pin......more

It is 1863 and fourteen-year-old Bright Morning is a Navaho girl living with her father, mother, and older sister Lapana in a village in the Canyon de Chelly, surrounded by mesas in what is now northeastern Arizona. Her brother had been killed by lightning. Her friends are White Deer and Running Bir......more

I have a weakness for a good Scott O'Dell book. I've always been intrigued by stories of survival. But Sing Down the Moon wasn't an O'Dell classic like Island of the Blue Dolphins was. It was very slow-moving and spent way too much time talking about sheep. Sheep this, sheep that. I read this for a......more

There is a point where you have to either submit to the macro history you are surviving, or you sacrifice yourself to futility. In this story we see history overwhelming the Diné (This 1970s text refers to them as the “Navaho”). Those less responsible for physically resisting history in this epoch,......more

Written in 1970, Scott O'Dell's "Sing Down the Moon" is a fictionalized account of the enslavement of Navajo children by Mexicans and their forced removal to Bosque Redondo/Fort Sumner by American soldiers during the 1860s. Had I been an adult when it was first published and had I read it back then,......more