"New Found Land," by Alan Wolf. amazon.com This book, billed as suitable for grade seven and up, caught the eye of a geezer. It's a novel written in first person poetic form in fourteen different voices, all principals of the Lewis and Clark expedition, The Corps of Discovery.
The title voice is none other than that of Seaman, Meriwether Lewis's big black bear of a Newfoundland dog--known to himself as Oolum. New Found Land is a story of a land at the dawn of its transition to a new existence, one that we know today as the western half of the United States of America. Other voices are Lewis himself, Clark, Thomas Jefferson, George Shannon, the Fields brothers, others of the expedition, and of course, Sacajawea.
Of course, it wasn't really New FOUND Land. It had been found some 10,000 years earlier, before the pyramids were built. But to the members of the expedition, and to many of us who love their story, it WAS NEW Found Land. More properly, I suppose, it was Land Found Anew.
This work is a blend of the actual words from the Journals, and what might have been said by the characters as they made their daily discoveries. I like its poetic style, unique among all the books I've read about this adventure. |
