The Sign of the Beaver by Elizabeth George Speare
Reviewed by AimeeRatings
Content Ratings based on a 0-5 scale where
0 = no objectionable content and
5 = an excessive or disturbing level of content
LANGUAGE
VIOLENCE
SEXUAL CONTENT
ADULT THEMES
Ratings Explanation
Language: One instance of damned is used but spelled demmed.
Violence: A man steals Matt’s gun. A bear gets in a cabin and leaves it in shambles. Bees swarm Matt and sting him so bad he almost dies. Attean gets angry and knocks a book off the table. An animal is caught in a trap and chews it’s own leg off to be free. Attean and Matt kill a bear. Attean tells about his mother being killed by white men. They talk about white men scalping Indians for money. A dog is caught in a trap.
Sexual Content: Indian children run naked.
Adult Themes: Matt is a very young boy left alone to fend for himself and manage a homestead when his father leaves to retrieve the rest of their family. A man comes through wishing there were some alcohol to go with his dinner.
Synopsis
When his father returns East to collect the rest of the family, 12-year-old Matt is left alone to guard his family’s newly built homestead. One day, Matt is brutally stung when he robs a bee tree for honey. He returns to consciousness to discover that his many stings have been treated by an old Native American and his grandson. Matt offers his only book as thanks, but the old man instead asks Matt to teach his grandson Attean to read. Both boys are suspicious, but Attean comes each day for his lesson. In the mornings, Matt tries to entice Attean with tales from Robinson Crusoe, while in the afternoons, Attean teaches Matt about wilderness survival and Native American culture. The boys become friends in spite of themselves, and their inevitable parting is a moving tribute to the ability of shared experience to overcome prejudice.
My daughter is reading this book in her school class and I thought I’d pick it up and read it too. The Sign of the Beaver is a Newbery Honor book with a great overall message of acceptance and how we can learn from people who are different than us. It is full of adventure and survival. The story of the Native Americans is tragic and I think this book provides a fantastic introduction to early readers of the the relationship between Native Americans and early settlers. School Library Journal recommends a reading level of grades 5-8.