The Revenant by Sonia Gensler is a hybrid book: part mystery, part ghost story, part historical fiction, part coming of age.  Seventeen year old Willie Hammond is attending a school she loves in the late 19th century when her mother writes her a letter, telling her she must take a break from school and return home to help on the farm.  Willie doesn’t feel like she belongs at the farm, so she steals her classmate Angeline McClure’s teaching certificate and runs away to accept a position as a teacher at a Cherokee female seminary in Indian Territory.

Once at the seminary, Willie finds it not at all what she expected.  Many of the Cherokee girls come from very wealthy families, and the school is far from rustic.  She struggles to get her bearings as a teacher and understand the complex socioeconomic situation at the school, where lighter-skinned and wealthier girls look down upon the full-blooded and more traditional girls.  What’s more, one of the students drowned in the river last year and she supposedly haunts her old room – the room where Willie now sleeps.  Willie becomes caught up in solving the mystery of the student who drowned and also becomes romantically involved with a student from the boys’ seminary.  She must juggle all this while keeping her true identity a secret.

I had two main problems with The Revenant, and the biggest one lies with the protagonist, Willie.  Willie’s reason for fleeing her home and impersonating Angeline McClure is an incredibly selfish one, although her feelings that led up to her actions are understandable.  To sum up: Willie’s father has died, and her mother has remarried, given birth to twin boys, and is pregnant with another child. She needs Willie’s assistance at home with the new baby, which means Willie’s schooling will be delayed awhile, but Willie doesn’t want to return home to a life of drudgery with a stepfather she loathes and a mother she resents for remarrying so quickly.  Therefore, Willie runs away from school to the Cherokee seminary and pretends to be a teacher.

I can understand the resentment toward her mother and stepfather, both for remarrying and for forcing Willie to leave school, even temporarily.  What’s harder to understand is Willie’s lack of an inner struggle.  It’s apparent that she’s not interested in getting to know her two little brothers or her new sibling on the way, and she hasn’t given a thought to how difficult it is for her mother to raise three children and run a farm without additional help.  She also doesn’t consider how her mother would worry about her.

One thing that can be said for Willie is that she routinely sends money back home, reassuring her mother that she is well.  This aspect makes me think Gensler wanted to portray some sort of guilt or inner struggle, but it’s virtually absent nonetheless, something particularly telling in a first-person story.

Part of the reason we read stories is to see how characters change and grow.  While some protagonists may not start out completely likable, they usually develop over the course of the story, making some kind of transformation.  Willie certainly does this, but it’s all taken care of in the last fifty pages, when she’s already returned home.  There’s almost no character development during her time at the seminary and she remains solidly unlikable until nearly the end.  

What’s more, Willie arrives at the seminary very much a girl, constantly intimidated by the senior female students and falling for the good-looking male students, and she leaves the same way, without learning how to really lead a class, assert her authority, or even grade papers.  The Revenant would have been a much stronger book if Gensler had begun Willie’s transformation during her time at the seminary, showing how the events that took place there shaped her character.  Instead, it is events that happen at home that cause her growth, making the story feel oddly divided.

The more minor problem has to do with the romance.  It might just be my old fuddy-duddy sensibilities at work, but the relationship between Willie and the male student, Eli Sevenstar, made me uncomfortable.  Granted, he is not in any of her classes and she’s not even technically a teacher, but the position of authority is still there.  Perhaps it unnerved me because situations like this have been in our modern news so much lately.  Beyond that, though, is the fact that Willie and Eli fall for each other before they even converse much.  Their romance is built on Eli’s good looks and Willie’s ability to blush.  

Neither of these faults make the book one not worth reading.  Gensler, a debut writer, has made a good start with The Revenant.  Her writing is fluid and she kept me interested.  I’ve always enjoyed a good mystery and Gensler delivered a fairly juicy one, full of secret trysts and red herrings.  The historical details, while not ubiquitous, were fascinating, and I appreciated learning about a time and place I knew almost nothing about.  I also feel she treated the school and its denizens’ culture with the sensitivity required.  I’d recommend The Revenant to fans of light mysteries, historical fiction, or not-so-scary ghost stories.  There’s a lot to enjoy here.

Review copy provided by publisher. The Revenant is on shelves now.