The Shaman Stone: A Multicultural Mystery of Supernatural Proportions

"Take an Indian burial ground a Hmong refugee, a con artist, a mysterious Indian woman, the ethnocentric president of a society of bluebloods, a curious stone, and thirteen-year-old Elizabeth Mae Radcliff. Put them all in Maggie Falls, Minnesota and you've got The Shaman Stone, a rip-roaring mystery to please adolescents and adults alike."--Dave Wood, book reviewer and past vice-president of the National Book Critics Circle.The State of Minnesota is unique in that it has a large American Indian population, the second largest group of Hmong immigrants in the nation, and once housed over eleven thousand Indian burial mounds. It is upon these elements The Shaman Stone is based. The Shaman Stone is set in the 1980s, in the aftermath of the Vietnam conflict, when many Hmong people were relocating in the United States. Their stories of fleeing from the Pathet Laos to settlements in the United States, as related in this book, are from actual accounts.Although this book is a work of fiction, the descriptions of Shamans, burial mounds, and migration of the first people to the Americas during the last Ice Age are based on archaeological and anthropological evidence. The inclusion of the Shaman Stone, time and space travel, and the bone and stone legend are, of course, fictional devices used to advance the story.