The Revenant

The Revenant is a 2011 young-adult supernatural mystery novel, the debut work of YA author Sonia Gensler. Set in the American South and Midwest during the year of 1896, The Revenant focuses on a teenage girl who takes a job as a teacher in the Cherokee Indian Territory in Oklahoma under an assumed identity. As she struggles to adjust to her new role as an educator and keep up the ruse of her identity, supernatural forces begin to swirl around the school and she must try to figure out the cause of the ghost’s violent actions before it begins claiming innocent lives. Exploring themes of responsibility, the influence of one’s family, and race relations, The Revenant uses its historical setting to shine a light on a little-known period of American history and bring attention to the historic treatment of Native Americans.

The story begins with Willie Hammond, a 17-year-old girl, unsure of what her next step in life is. She hopes to stay in school and continue her late father’s dream of an education for her. All she knows for sure is that she doesn’t want to return home to the family farm with her mother, stepfather, and siblings. When she receives a letter from her mother asking her to come home and do her part in caring for the family, she makes the decision to run away. Taking the identity of a classmate, Angelina McClure, her journey takes her to the Cherokee Indian Seminary, where she poses as an English teacher for Native students.

At the school, Willie quickly slips into her new role, and is surprised to find out that the students she is teaching are not uneducated children, as she assumed. Rather they are intelligent, motivated students who are eager to learn. Some are even older than her. She soon finds herself in over her head as her students pick up on the fact that she’s inexperienced. She’s prone to make ill-advised comments that her students pick up on. Despite this, she is determined to stick it out and eventually finds her footing as a teacher. She even bonds with an older boy from the neighboring boys’ school, Eli Sevenstar, although her role impersonating a teacher brings complications to this.

However, it soon becomes clear that her difficulties as a teacher are the least of her worries. Students are reporting strange, supernatural events going on around the school, and Willie soon begins to observe the same phenomena. It turns out that the girl who lived in Willie’s room before her met an untimely death, and it soon becomes the prevailing theory that she is haunting the school. A fellow teacher at the school, Miss Adair, is a firm believer in the supernatural, and she quickly becomes a friend and ally to Willie as they investigate the increasing supernatural events. As they attempt to uncover the identity of the ghost and put it to rest before people get hurt, Willie is forced to reckon not only with the angry spirit, but with her own past.

One of the main themes of The Revenant is the influence of the past and one’s parents on their current actions, and as the book goes on, it becomes clear that Willie’s father was not the sainted figure laid out at the start of the book, but rather a very flawed figure who instilled in her negative behavior patterns, played her against her mother, and led her to make her decision to run away from home to Oklahoma. Although he is long dead when the book begins, it can be argued that he is as much the revenant haunting the title character as the phantom in the school. It is only when Willie eventually returns home at the end of the book that she confronts the past and puts her own personal revenant to rest. The extended epilogue sheds light on the truth about the family that Willie was so determined to get away from, as Willie grows up and stops running from her responsibilities and past.

Sonia Gensler grew up in a small Tennessee town and worked a variety of jobs as a young adult including museum interpreter, bookseller, and historic home director. Later, she worked as a high school English teacher, just like her lead character. She eventually moved to Oklahoma where she now writes full-time. The trajectory of her life influenced the character of Willie extensively. Since The Revenant made its debut as her first novel, she has written two additional books in the middle-grade and young adult supernatural mystery genre, The Dark Between (2013) and Ghostlight (2015). All three have been well-received, with The Revenant being particularly critically acclaimed. Since its release, it won both the Parents’ Choice Silver Award and the Oklahoma Book Award, and earned a place on the 2014 Intermediate Sequoia Masterlist.