And now we come to The Ghost of Eagle Mountain. As a child reader, this one and Face Off! were my favorites of the entire series. Told from Allison’s perspective, this book focuses on a skiing trip that she and her fellow seventh-graders take to Eagle Mountain (which I recently learned is a real place in Minnesota). Allison and the gang find out that they are rooming together, but the other four people in their cabin will be vain, snobby, Stacey “the Great” Hansen and her friends Eva, Laurel, and B.Z.
From the first mention of the trip to Eagle Mountain, Allison has a dreadful feeling that something terrible will happen. Then, she inexplicably finds a loose eagle feather in her locker at school. Allison’s grandma later tells her a story about a man named Eagle Feather who was one of their family’s tribe, the Chippewa. He was separated from his wife and child when the Indians were relocated to a reservation. The legend says that he haunts the area around Eagle Mountain, searching for his lost love.
On the way to Eagle Mountain, the school bus breaks down, and Allison can’t shake the ominous feeling of dread. Allison and her friends do have a good bit of fun learning to ski from their cute instructor. However, when given the task to go on a scavenger hunt on skis, the girls get lost after trying to take a shortcut. This feels like something that would almost never happen in real life. Chaperones are always right around the corner on school trips. It’s hard to believe they’d let a bunch of groups go off on their own through the woods on skis. Allison and company get sooo lost. They wind up crossing a stream and then skiing near a frozen river.
Inexplicably, the girls find their way back to the trail. Or, I guess I should say that they stumble onto the ski lodge by dumb luck.
After dinner, Ranger Rob begins to tell all the 7th graders a ghost story, and Allison realizes it’s the story her grandma told her about Eagle Feather. However, Rob’s story is completely different. He calls Eagle Feather by the name of Flying Eagle and says that Flying Eagle was a menacing Indian who liked to attack white settlers. He says that now that Flying Eagle is dead he roams Eagle Mountain in search of his next victims. Allison, of course, becomes enraged. I remember feeling upset, too, while reading this as a middle-schooler. I didn’t have the language to describe it back then, but I just knew and understood what an injustice it was. Now I see that this is a prime example of history being mistold and distorted by the victors. God only knows how many real-life instances we have of this. In grad school a white classmate of mine asked why we need to teach books by a diversity of authors. My best answer is that diverse reading helps us see things from multiple perspectives. When I teach slave narratives in American lit classes, students are often shocked by the stories. They grew up knowing that slavery existed in this country, but many history books don’t go into much detail about the gruesome, inhumane ways slaves were treated. That’s why we need diversity. We need for people to read multiple perspectives in order for them to understand. Same is true for Native Americans and settlers and the long and painful history about what happened between them.
One issue I have with this book is that things are tied up too neatly. Allison ventures off into the woods because she thinks she hears the ghost of Eagle Feather moaning. She gets lost but sits down and sings to the ghost. Her voice quiets the wind and the moaning. Then, an eagle feather drifts down from the sky. She takes this as a sign that the ghost is now at rest. Too easy. Then, her friends find her after she’s only been lost for about ten minutes. Too easy.
Don’t get me wrong. I still like this book because I like its message about giving a voice to oppressed people. However, I guess I was expecting a bit more complexity, which might be too much to ask of a book for middle-graders. Anyway, it’s still a good book and one I’d recommend to school kids.
Grade: A-
Monic Ductan 
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