Shelterwood by Lisa Wingate

 Shelterwood offers protection for a band of children, most of them orphans, in 1909 in Oklahoma, in Lisa Wingate’s latest novel Shelterwood, coming out June 4. Alongside the 1909 story is one told in 1990 about a female park ranger, Valerie Boren-Odell, a widow who is trying to start over with her young son in the Horsethief Trail National Park, which is about to open. The two timelines grow toward one another when three children’s bones are found in one of the caves within the park.

Eleven-year-old Ollie Radley leads the children toward Shelterwood in the Winding Stair Mountains after she and a six-year-old Choctaw girl escape Olive’s predator stepfather. Along the way, more Choctaw children, the “elves“ of Oklahoma, join the two girls on their way to the haven Olive once lived in with both her parents. The children were victims of guardians who only took them in for the oil rights granted to Choctaw children at that time.

Valerie has left Yellowstone Park where her ranger husband died while trying to retrieve the body of a hiker. Former military, she is well trained and experienced in ranger work, but she finds some of the men in the ranger office reluctant to accept her, quickly chasing her away from investigating the remains found in the cave. Instead, she finds a friend in a Choctaw Tribal policeman, one who has a wealth of knowledge about the area. They partner in their search for a missing teen, which leads them to a discovery that will reveal the outcome of Ollie and the other children.

Lisa Wingate is the author of Before We Were Yours, which remained on the bestseller list for more than two years. The book was based on one of America’s most notorious real-life scandals in which Georgia Tann, director of a Memphis-based adoption organization, kidnapped and sold poor children to wealthy families all over the country. Wingate lives in Texas and Colorado with her family.

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting April 3, 2024.

I would like to thank Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House Publishers, and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.