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Daughter of Winter by Pat Lowery Collins is one of those books that a lot of people write to me about. I ordered a copy from the Urbana Free Library in April and read it, making notes as I did. I meant to write about it right away, but the news broke about bin Laden and the use of Geronimo's name for bin Laden, and I set Daughter of Winter aside and am returning to it now.

Here's the product description from the Amazon site:

It’s 1849, and twelve-year-old Addie lives in the shipbuilding town of Essex, Massachusetts. Her father has left the family to seek gold on the West Coast, and now the flux has taken the lives of her mother and baby brother, leaving Addie all alone. Her fear of living as a servant in some other home drives her into the snowy woods, where she survives on her own for several weeks before a nomadic, silver-haired Wampanoag woman takes her in. Slowly, the startling truth of Addie’s past unfolds. Through an intense ancient ceremony, and by force of her own wits and will, Addie unravels the mystery of her identity — and finds the courage to build a future unlike any she could ever have imagined. 

I like the cover. The story? It doesn't work. Glaring problems abound. That "nomadic, silver-haired Wampanoag woman" turns out to be Nokummus, Addie's grandmother who, we're told several times, sits cross-legged. 

• On page 107, "Nokummus sat cross-legged on a pile of blankets..." 
• On page 108, "It is time for a story," she said, cross-legged again..." 
• On page 111, "...we sat cross-legged together inside a large wetu.  

 Why insert "cross-legged" each time? Does it matter? Is it an important detail? Would it have mattered if the first sentence read "Nokummus sat on a pile of blankets..."  and the last one said "we sat together inside a large wetu." 

Let's think about sitting with your legs crossed. I sit that way when I'm sitting on my bedroll when we're camping. I don't do that because I'm an Indian! It just happens to be a comfortable way to sit when you don't have a chair handy. I'd bet that you sit that way, too. It isn't an "Indian" thing to do, but it is definitely associated with Indians...

I don't know how, when, or why "sit Indian style" came into common use. I found an interesting discussion about it, wherein a photographer says that kids today don't know what it means. He asks (in a forum) about the phrase. Reading comments there and elsewhere, it looks like the phrase is dropping out of use. Young children are being taught to sit "criss cross applesauce" or "like a pretzel" instead. Course, adults still use it without pause. A good case in point is Laura Bush, who uses it in her book, Spoken from the Heart. She writes on page 47: "We would stand silently with our binoculars, or sit Indian style, and wait for the birds to swoop down..."

In two other places in Daughter of Winter we read about Nokummus sitting. On page 156 Nokummus "sat down by the fire." Later on page 251, she sits on a stoop.

How do other characters sit? At one point, Addie and John are by a fire. They "sat" as John cooks a rabbit. 

Am I belaboring this point?! Maybe. I'll move on to other aspects of the book that yanked me out o the story...

Like...  the way that Nokummus is described.  From here on, I'll need to distinguish summary from my thoughts. I'll put my thoughts in italics.

In

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