Once in a while you'll come across a book that will tug at your heart, and will continue to do so long after you've put it down. Margaret Craven's novel, I Heard the Owl Call My Name, is such a book. Mark Brian is a young Anglican vicar sent to an isolated Native village in British Columbia's Pacific Northwest. He finds a people struggling to keep their culture alive -- the young have alienated themselves from their cultural heritage and are adopting a more modern life in the white society. Broken totems poles, and burial grounds where the moss-covered bones of their ancestors are left unattended is all that is left of a once noble nation. The young vicar has unknowingly been diagnosed with a fatal disease. It is his journey through the land of the dying and the departed that will earn him the right to a funeral for a king, and so -- he hears the owl call his name.
A truly wonderful, heart-wrenching story, which will have a permanent place on my shelf of books to read over and over again.
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