Thirteen-year-old Uwohali has not seen his father, Sequoyah, for many years. So when Sequoyah returns to the village, Uwohali is eager to reconnect. But Sequoyah s new obsession with making strange markings causes friends and neighbors in their tribe to wonder whether he is crazy, or worse practicing witchcraft. What they don t know, and what Uwohali discovers, is that Sequoyah is a genius and his strange markings are actually an alphabet representing the sounds of the Cherokee language.