The Foothill Spirits, Book Two: Shawnees & Runaway Slaves

Betty Casbeer Carroll
iUniverse (2006)
ISBN 9780595382460
Reviewed by Cathy Yanda for Reader Views (1/07)

This second juvenile fiction book in “The Foothill Spirits” series focuses on Shawnees and Runaway Slaves drawing the reader in as the pages are turned. Ms. Carroll paints historical stories set in Southern Ohio, intermingling both fictional and historical characters. She does this so well the reader may not even be aware of all they learn. In the first novel in the series, Heather Jean’s spirit is transported to 1803 and merges with 12-year-old Maggie Sue. Over the next seven months, she can see, hear, and speak through Maggie Sue causing many outward changes in behavior. Wrongly accused of being a witch, she died of typhoid fever before she turned 13.

The second story picks up with the protagonist, Heather Jean, living in 1997. When she falls and hits her head, her spirit merges with Morning Glory, Maggie Sue’s niece, in the year 1832. From that point on, we experience things through Morning Glory’s eyes as she works through many of the same adolescent issues we all do and end in the end finds her true self, Maggie. She is half Shawnee and half (Scotch-Irish) Paleface and lives in a time when it is not acceptable for Shawnee to go into town, to school, or anywhere public. Her younger sister, Yellow Tulip, looks enough like their Paleface cousins to be able to do many of the things Morning Glory cannot. This is not to imply Morning Glory does not have adventures of her own. She helps her parents hide and move slaves along the Underground Railroad, lives through the floods of 1832, listens as her father told stories of his help constructing the canal, experiences a vision quest, attends a powwow, and contracts cholera.

To help the reader, Ms. Carroll has included a List of Characters and Sources at the end of the book. There is also a section, “Fact versus Fiction: Book Two,” which gives further insight by chapter into the writing that could easily be used as a resource for further discussion by students studying history or genealogy in either traditional education or home schooled.

Having grown up in the area of Southern Ohio where Ms. Carroll sets her stories, I could mentally see the places. “The Foothill Spirits, Book Two: Shawnees & Runaway Slaves” was made even more interesting to me by her bringing in the surnames of my ancestors, Douglas, Davis, Armstrong, and Johnson.

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