Norman Two Bull is a modern and savvy fifteen-year-old Sioux who lives on a Dakota reservation with his parents. He is impatient with, if not faintly contemptuous of, the "old ways." Encouraged by his grandfather, Norman makes a perilous climb to the top of a sacred butte, searching for agates where Indian boys had once gone for spirit visions. There, unexpectedly, he finds an ancient relic with the power to make strange things happen-and they do! When Thunders Spoke is a haunting story whose strength often lies in what is not said.

Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve, National Humanities Medal Winner for the year 2000, spent her childhood on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation and still lives in South Dakota. She is the mother of three children. Illustrator Oren Lyons is a chief of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation and a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo.