By Lauren Wolk
If you haven’t already fallen into Ellie’s life, listen to her description of herself in Chapter Four :
“I myself was two opposite things at the same time. One: I was now an excellent woods-girl who could hunt and trap and fish and harvest as if I’d been born to it. Two: I was an echo girl. When I clubbed a fish to death, my own head ached and shuddered. When I snared a rabbit, I knew what it meant to be trapped. And when I pulled a carrot from the sheath of its earth, I too missed the darkness.”
“ The stars stopped me for a minute...There aren’t many hurts that a sky-meadow full of clean white blossoms can’t make at a least a little better.”
As she follows, “the flame in [her] chest,” Ellie grows up in this book. She holds a secret about her father’s accident within and it nearly crushes her flame but she listens and questions and learns and watches the mountain and its inhabitants and knows what she must to do to survive and live as her own person. Ellie must constantly nurture her heart flame and we, the reader encourage her throughout this whole beautiful book.
I leave you with one of the book’s blessings. It is a translation from Gaelic:
“Good health to you and every blessing.”