2020/88: Bone River -- Megan Chance

'...I must conclude the brain itself so lacking that any attempt at civilization must go awry. But as to whether the experiment itself is so, it remains too early to predict.’ Daniel looked up. “The experiment? What experiment is he talking about?”
I frowned. “When was that written?”
A glance down again. “June 16, 1851.”
I would have been thirteen, and working with Papa almost daily, and yet this was the first I’d heard of any experiment. [loc. 2989]

I hadn't consciously decided, when I finished The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter, to read another novel about a scientist's daughter discovering that she's an experiment ... I purchased Bone River in 2013 (there are older purchases in my Unread folder, but not many): suddenly the time felt right to read about Leonie, orphaned at seventeen and married to her ethnographer father's much older assistant, Junius.

The setting is the Pacific Northwest, in the mid-nineteenth century. Junius and Leonie make a living from their oyster beds: it's hard physical labour, but they live well, and Leonie is happy enough -- though mourns the lack of children. Then Leonie discovers a mummified body, a woman's body, in the mud at the edge of the river, and everything changes.

Daniel, Junius' son from a previous marriage, arrives without warning, drawn by news of the incredible find. Junius is determined to ship the relic to the Smithsonian for a major ethnology exhibition -- it'll make his name, and bring in money. Lord Tom, one of the few remaining Chinook (and something of a father-figure to Leonie) is uncomfortable with the idea of the dead being treated without reverence: so is Leonie, who's visited by vivid dreams of the dead woman.

I felt I was constantly one step ahead of Leonie here: she's puzzled by the discovery of her father's necklace in the woman's basket-work covering; confounded by the existence of this never-mentioned son; confused by her husband's sexual habits and his insistence that she not drink or dance when they go into town. Yet, even predicting what was to come, I found Leonie a fascinating character, and her decisions wholly reasonable -- though she berates herself for having too much imagination, for her sense of the land being haunted.

A vivid evocation of life at the edge of the colonised world, where the greatest danger is the weather (fierce storms, torrential rain, floods) but a different kind of danger comes from 'civilisation' and the cities.