August, 1896: 17 year old Willie is a liar and a thief. She’s fleeing to Indian Territory, using a stolen name and teacher’s certificate, to take a position as English teacher at the Cherokee Female Seminary. Willie assumes she’ll be teaching backwards Indian children and hopes that the chances of being discovered and sent back to her family farm are slim. But she’s not prepared for what awaits her in Oklahoma: the Seminary boarding school educates both the daughters of the Cherokee Elite, and the poor tribal girls there on scholarship, many of whom are more educated that Willie is; the Headmistress is stern and extremely watchful of her charges and her teaching staff; and there are rumors of the ghost of a student who drowned in the river last year haunting the school. To make matters worse, a young man from the nearby Cherokee boy’s school has taken an interest in Willie and she can’t deny the powerful attraction she feels towards him.
With the help of a friendly colleague, Willie settles into a livable, though somewhat uncomfortable, groove studying at night to stay just ahead of her students and working to maintain discipline and order in her classroom. Although Willie doesn’t believe in ghosts, when the hauntings and strange occurrences escalate to injuries against some of the students, she begins to question her beliefs. Unwittingly, Willie finds herself investigating the drowned young woman’s situation and slowly realizes that there’s more to this than a simple drowning. Soon both the terror surrounding the revenant and the threat of having her fraud being discovered come to a head, and Willie is left with no choice but to face the danger and make a stand to do what’s right and just for everyone.
While I was expecting Sonia Gensler’s The Revenant to be a typical supernatural romance/mystery, I was pleasantly surprised by two thoughtful additions Gensler made to the this often over-used genre: first, the author did extensive research on the real Cherokee Female Seminary and successfully created a sense of the place, the time, and the political struggles that surrounded the school. The seminary did house both the daughters of the elite and the poorer girls whose education was paid for by the generosity of the Cherokee Nation, and there was a class struggle between these students that is portrayed skillfully in The Revenant. The second thing that I enjoyed about this story is how Gensler handled Willie’s maturing over the course of the book. Without giving too much away, the story could have easily ended where most supernatural mysteries/romances do – when the ghost is quelled and the mystery is solved – but here, when Willie’s fraud is revealed she must return to face the life from which she ran away. The narrative spent on Willie’s days at home, her gradual acceptance of her family and her own responsibilities, and the choices she makes in the spring of 1897, show real growth in her character which I found refreshing, empowering, and worth celebrating.
- Posted by Cori