Sorrow's Knot

After Otter's mother, a binder of the dead, dies rather than allowing herself to be possessed by a ghostly White Hand, Otter and her friends venture beyond the bounds of their forest settlement to find the White Hands' origin. This spirit-filled fantasy world gives a hair-raising sensation of being surrounded by unknown dangers and evokes Native American cultures without caricaturing them.

In the forest settlement of Westmost, Otter, Kestrel, and Cricket grow up together: Cricket to be a storyteller; Kestrel to be a ranger and travel outside the wards; and Otter to be a powerful binder, tying the knots that bind the hungry dead. When Willow -- the community's binder and Otter's mother -- is touched by a White Hand and kills herself rather than let the spirit take over her body, Otter is left puzzling over Willow's words: "Something is wrong, Otter. The knots are wrong." A clue may lie in a story Cricket learns as an apprentice storyteller, about Mad Spider, the first binder, and how she bound her mother's spirit too tightly, trapping it between here and there and creating the first White Hand. But for revealing a tale held secret among the storytellers, Cricket is banished and left to wander defenseless through the forest. The spirits of the dead are sketched with tactical vagueness, heightening the hair-raising sensation of being surrounded by unknown dangers. The magic of yarn and knots mixes the familiar and exotic to good effect, while the setting gestures toward Native American culture without caricaturing it. As Otter and Kestrel set out to find Cricket in defiance of their elders' rules, their journey takes them to Mad Spider's own territory, where, face-to-face with the oldest of the White Hands, they will either appease her -- or be turned into White Hands themselves. anita l. burkam