Death on Sacred Ground

by Harriet K. Feder

Overview

In the deep woods of Pikes Landing, New York, on a Seneca reservation a girl is found murdered with an arrow through her heart. When they hear about the shocking death, Vivi and her father, Rabbi Hartman, find themselves in the middle of a mystery. There they find a violent standoff between the local townsfolk and the Seneca. The death of the girl may not be what it seems, and strange events keep happening. Unsure of who to trust, Vivi searches for the solution to the disturbing death, but finds danger instead!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781467732017
Publisher:	Lerner Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/01/2013
Series:	Fiction - Middle Grade
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	792 KB
Age Range:	12 - 13 Years

Editorial Reviews

Gr 6-9-Impossibilities vie with implausibilities in this problematic novel. Vivi, a high school student from Buffalo, accompanies her rabbi father to a tiny New York village where a Jewish girl was supposedly felled by an unknown archer. She then sets to work to help a new friend disprove popular belief that a resident Seneca teenager is the murderer. While the author provides respectful glosses on being Jewish in a remote American rural town and how Seneca people ascribe kinship ties, she founders on many more fronts pertinent to her story. The accused archer is nearly blind; his friends willingly take Vivi into their confidence, even allowing her to dress in an ancestor's ceremonial clothing; the evangelical Christians at the local high school, led by the handsome young English teacher, are up to no good from the get-go; and, most alarming, the murdered girl's mother, a known child abuser, is never threatened with the loss of her younger daughters. That the murdered girl's body cannot be retrieved from where she fell because would-be rescuers are repelled by lively snakes-in December, in upstate New York-is not a plot twist that helps readers take any of this seriously. Even more issues are trotted onto center stage, however briefly. Few readers will swallow the array of oddities and foregone conclusions offered here.-Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

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