Fifteen-year-old Anita Whiterock, a Navajo teenager living on a New Mexico reservation, struggles with conflicting forces as she tries to reconcile traditional Navajo ways with her desires for progress.
Hobart Slim lives an uneventful life helping his mother and uncle run a shabby hotel, and the biggest thing in his life is coping with the school bully. Then Lettie Mendoza comes to town and teaches him to stand up for himself.
Contains a history of the Navajo code talkers, Native Americans who devised codes using their native langauges that were used by the United States military in World War II and never broken.