Dream Weaver - Softcover

Penina Keen Spinka is the author of many award-winning novels for young adults about Native American culture. She lives with her husband in Glendale, Arizona.

Novelist and young adult author Spinka continues her compelling narrative of 14th-century Inuit and Viking communities in Greenland in this follow-up to her first adult novel, Picture Maker. Here, Ingrid (Dream Weaver), daughter of a Norse Greenlander and the late Native American visionary Picture Maker (heroine of the first book), holds center stage as the Norse settlement struggles for its survival after virtually being abandoned by Norway. An infestation of grass-eating butterfly larvae and a devastating rampage by English warriors drive Ingrid and her father and two half-brothers to seek refuge in an Inuit village. Ingrid, who was contemptuously viewed as a half-breed by her father's people, and as a lowly pagan by Christian missionaries, once again feels out of place when she is unable to suppress her independent nature to fit Inuit ideals of submissive women. She sets off on her own journey, hoping to find her mother's native village at the base of the St. Lawrence River. Spinka's painstaking research into customs, rituals and social mores of Native Americans and Greenland settlers makes for a captivating history, and much of her storytelling is gripping. Yet the plot becomes overcrowded and messy when she tries to tie in the historic union of the five great North American tribal nations with Ingrid's search for her mother's homeland. As well, Picture Maker looms a bit too large in this tale, which covers much of the same territory-both geographically and thematically-as its precursor.
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