New York Times bestselling author Lisa Wingate released her newest novel a few months ago and I was eager to open its pages since she is a favorite author and great storyteller. I finally jumped into it last week after finishing other reading. (If you follow my blog you know I read a wide variety of things and always like to have a good novel in the mix.)
Shelterwood is set in the beautiful state of Oklahoma shortly after it had become a state. Pioneers were flocking into the area for its diverse landscape, mineral riches, and hope for a better life as a farmer or rancher. In the mix were men eager to capitalize on the state’s unexplored riches who were willing to do anything to gain an advantage. Indian tribal lands were carved out and disputed. Underhanded deals were made by men lusting for power in the new state and the pioneer women and their children often got lost in the wrangling many times. It was a hard life.
The story begins in 1990 when Valerie Boren-Odell, a widowed single mother, arrives in Talihina, as a park ranger for the Horsethief Trail National Park. She hoped her experience in other locations like Yosemite National Park would serve her well but she soon discovers the team here is not accustomed to a woman ranger and an outsider. She hopes for the best but finds a job she has loved becomes a challenge with the testy atmosphere as she grieves the death of her husband and tries to help her son, Charlie, 8, adjust to a new life.
As Val traverses the park and begins to get familiar with the trails and regular folks and programs, she happens upon a cave with the bones of three young children that catches her up in a quest to discover who they are and how they got there and when.
As the thread of this story goes on, Lisa Wingate takes the reader back to the same area in 1909 where we meet three little girls living in an attic room of a house where a stepfather lives with her mother who is addicted to drugs and unaware of the abusive condition her daughter and two other part Indian orphan girls are enduring. Hazel, Nessa, and Olive are doing the best they can to survive the wiles of stepfather Tesco Peele. When Hazel, the oldest, runs away, Olive (Ollie) know it’s not going to be safe for her and Nessa to stay there.
They decide to set off on their own when Tesco is away using an old calico pony that had been Olive’s dad’s. Olive has plans to live off the land and get to the cabin in Winding Stair Mountains where she had lived with her mother and dad. This trek will be fraught with danger and risks beyond what Olive could have guessed. It opens the read to the true story of the condition of many such children and orphans during that time trying to escape workhouses and all manner of abuse by those who wanted to use them for their own gain.
The girls will be just one step ahead of the stepfather chasing to find them and law enforcement seeking them when they are begging and sometimes stealing food and scraps along the way to try to sustain them. The bond between the two girls deepens in their effort to survive.
As only Lisa Wingate can do, the reader sinks into the two parallel stories of 1909 and 1990 introducing you to politics, land grabs, and a variety of unsavory characters. Page by page the reader is left wondering who will survive and how they will manage that and little by little, Wingate brings the threads of the two stories together in a dramatic climax that will fill in all the unexpected connection between 1909 and 1990.
If you love a good novel that gives nothing away until the parallel stories have ripened to just the perfect path, this novel will not disappoint you and keep you guessing through much of it until the end. It’s an excellent work of historical fiction opening your eyes to the plight of unwanted orphans, illegal guardians, and the untold stories of life in Oklahoma in 1909.