Ghost stories should be spooky and mysterious. Otherwise, what's the point? 
 Unfortunately, neither thrill nor chill shows up until after the halfway point of "The Revenant," and even the few spooky moments aren't really scary. Sonia Gensler does provide a fascinating glimpse of the Cherokee Territories and the people who lived there, but her heroine doesn't get a lot of development until the book's end. 
 When her mother summons her back to the family farm, Willemina Hammond is desperate not to return. So she steals her rich classmate's unused teaching certificate and heads to the Cherokee Female Seminary in Oklahoma, posing as Angeline McClure. She's immediately assigned a room that once belonged to Ella, a girl tragically murdered by her hotheaded boyfriend a year ago. 
 And as the year goes by, strange occurrences start plaguing the school -- students are injured in "accidents," and someone keeps knocking at Willie's window. She begins to suspect that Ella was not murdered by her boyfriend, but by another lover. However, that man may be Eli Sevenstar, a handsome student who has ensnared Willie's heart. Was Eli the murderer, or did someone else have a motive? 
 Sonia Gensler has obviously done a lot of homework on her setting -- she studies the lives of the Cherokee of the late 1800s, the "half-blood" children who struggled for recognition, and their struggles between Cherokee traditions and white society. As a historical novel, "The Revenant" is a genuinely intriguing story that leaves you wanting to know more. 
 But as a ghost story, it falls flat. The first half of the story is a dull dry stretch of teaching woes, with the occasional mention of a desk falling on someone. It's not scary, and even when the "revenant" finally shows itself, it wasn't even vaguely frightening. The story DOES pick up when Willie finds a major clue to the murderer's identity, and the human criminal is actually scarier than any of the ghostly activity. 
 Also Willie's character development is mostly crammed into the last five chapters of the book, when she finally grows up and learns forgiveness, understanding, and the fact that her idolized father was a flawed person. It feels like Gensler got to the end of the story and realized that Willie was still a pretty thin character, so she wrote a short story to flesh her out and wrap up the romantic subplot. 
 "The Revenant" is a story with good bones, but a slow first half, an unscary ghost story, and a heroine who only becomes 3D in the last few chapters. I'd keep an eye out for Gensler's future works, but this one is mostly interesting for the information on the Cherokee.