Beyond the Dark River

Darleen R. Golke is a high-school teacher and librarian in Winnipeg.

Forty-five years after a holocaust has destroyed Canada’s cities,
14-year-old Daughter-of-She-Who-Came-After and her grandmother
administer the healing arts of their tribe to the “damaged ones,”
the survivors of the disaster. On Daughter-of-She-Who-Came-After’s
first solo stint as the Healer, she meets 15-year-old Benjamin Gross,
who has persuaded the council of his Bruderhof, the Hutterite community,
to allow him to leave the isolation and protection of the Bruderhof and
journey to the edge of the Rocky Mountain forest to find the Healer. The
Bruderhof children have contracted a mysterious illness and are sick and
dying.

Daughter-of-She-Who-Came-After decides to accompany Benjamin to the
Bruderhof. However, when Benjamin realizes she is not able to cure the
children with herbal remedies, as doctor designate of the Bruderhof, he
resolves to journey to the university library in Edmonton to seek a cure
from books. Realizing that the sheltered Benjamin does not understand
the dangers of journeying to the city, the Place of the Dead,
Daughter-of-She-Who-Came-After accompanies him on his quest.

This reissue of Hughes’s 1979 speculative fiction classic explores
the themes of respect and tolerance between the Native and Hutterite
cultures. Hughes creates two strong and sympathetic characters in
Benjamin and Daughter-of-She-Who-Came-After, who, through their rite of
passage to adulthood, accept their roles but resolve that although their
“destinies differ,” their “future will work out properly, if
[they] leave [them]selves open to the working.” Young readers who
persevere past the opening chapters will be richly rewarded by reading
this well-written story.