Shelterwood

By: Lisa Wingate

Libby audiobook, print copies from Scott County and Dakota County, 331 pages plus author's note and acknowledements

Read by: Christine Lakin, Jenna Lamia, and Dan Bittner

Published: 2024

Genre: Christian historical fiction

We discussed this at book club on Monday evening. Set in both the early 1900s and 1990, it traveled between young Olive Augusta Radley and park ranger Valerie Boren-Odell. I do have a spoiler alert below, if you've not read the book.

 

Page 19: "She didn't see that Tesco's kindliness is like a poison dripping on your skin. You don't know it's there till it seeps in."

 

Tesco was such a creepy awful character! For eleven year old Olive to see the way he was trying to groom little Nessa was just sad. A child shouldn't have to try to protect another child.

 

Page  43: "I'll let the water people have me. It's better than Tesco."

 

Again, for a child to be okay with facing death by drowning rather than have to return to a "stepfather" who's abusive and frightening is just so sad. This is one of those "nothing new under the sun" things . . . horrible, evil men who use little girls for their own sexual satisfaction is not just a modern day phenomenon.

 

Page  66: "He's a diminutive man in a beige cardigan, plaid polyester pants circa 1975, loafers, and a tweed fedora. With thick bottle-bottom glasses magnifying eyes of a bright amber hew, and a bulbous nose, he looks like a cross between Mr. Magoo and Tom Landry. A library ghost come to life."

This description of Mr. Wouda as he approaches Valerie made me laugh. I also wondered about the author's use of "hew" instead of "hue." What am I missing? The cut of his eyes?

Page 113: "The night and the scene are too beautiful to be wasted hating the people across the room. Hate is a thief that will steal everything and return nothing if you let it."

Valerie is wise in assessing the pointlessness of hating awful people. I'm surprised she could keep it together when the men in the diner were making rude comments to her son because of her job. I'm not good at holding in my vitriol when I'm angry.

Page 113: "Charlie picks that exact moment to surface from finger-sampling his dessert. His thick brown eyelashes fly upward. 'We're getting a puppy?'"

I love this! Little kids and puppies . . . made me smile.

Page 242: "The right thing is hardly ever the easy thing, Val. That was one of the last pieces of advice my dad offered before he died."

Valerie (like Olive) had learned a lot from a positive father figure. I loved that parallel.

Page 250: "That's how strong a tree, or a person, or a family is. Strong as the roots, see? . . . The old shelterwood trees keep the forest safe from the wind and the weather, from too much sun and heat in the summer, too much snow in the winter. They're strong and pull up the water from down deep in the drought times, hold the soil so everything smaller can grow, and all of that comes from the roots of this big ol' tree. The old take care of the young, just like a family."

Olive's dad taught her so much wisdom in her young life. (He died when she was around eight years old?)

Page 270: I'm not quoting anything from this page, but I was so incredibly agitated when Ollie ran into the laundry man in the alley and she was being drawn in by her fear and his tricks. I kept wanting to yell, "Run!" I put a tab here simply because of my visceral fear that she would be taken and hurt.

Page 279: "On the tax rolls it's listed under the name Hazel Rusk, . . . "

When Curtis said this to Valerie, my mind spun into possibilities. I was sure Hazel (Nessa's older sister) had been molested and killed by Tesco. Then I wondered if one of the girls had survived and used her name. Early on in the book, I was sure that the three buried children in the cave were Hazel, Olive, and Nessa. As the book went on, my thoughts about the dead children changed. The author really kept me wondering!

Page 280: "I'll circle back to this uncertainty again and again. Maybe it will always be this hard. To trust. To let anyone in after losing Joel. The people you're close to aren't guaranteed. They can be gone in an instant."

True story. Value the time you have now and the people in your life. Life is short and precious.

Page 301: "Skeedee's been a good friend to me, and he deserves better. Nothing should belong to Tesco Peele, ever."

Olive feels sad for the horse to have to be owned by that awful man! Skeedee had been a good horse (and friend) to her.

Page 313: "Shelterwood is an obscure forestry term for older, larger trees that protect the smaller, younger growth beneath. I know the word. I can quote the definition, but it won't help me build a case."

Valerie is smart and well-educated, but confused. Olive (aged now) goes on to explain the name for Shelterwood (the home the children made) to Valerie and Curtis. I do love when the author "explains" the book's name. Just as the term refers to forestry, in some ways Olive played that role in protecting Nessa. 

Page 313: "But one must never believe what can be read in the history books about powerful men. The wealthy have the privilege of writing their own stories as they like. Tonight I will tell you what is true."

I'm so thankful that in my freshman year of college, Dr. Idzerda had us reading first person accounts - diaries, letters, etc. History is made up of people's stories. We all experience things differently and we tend to interpret history through our own experience. 

Page 317: "'But it is an eternal truth . . . and you young people remember this, if you remember nothing else I say.' The storyteller locks eyes with each of us, one by one. 'Your burden will often become your salvation. It was only for this reason, the burden of a remarkably heavy load of wood, that those two girls from the attic, Ollie and Nessa, were not separated forever the evening Shelterwood was destroyed."

I was going to type more of this paragraph, but the main point here is the idea that your burden can become your salvation. We talked about it at book club. Sometimes what we struggle with helps us become who God wants us to be. For all the female characters in this story, strength grew through adversity.

Page 322: "We don't always get what we seek in places like this. I've been involved in enough court cases to know that justice is not the idealized woman on the statues, blindfolded and draped in flowing robes. She's battered and chipped, and she has picked herself up from a million hard falls, dusted off her scales, and gone back to work."

Justice is a powerful concept. I like the author's description here.

Page 326: "My heartstrings tug, and I want to call my mother and my grandmother, the women who built me - who implanted the idea that whatever path I chose for myself, I could conquer it."

Valerie has a wonderful connection to the women who raised her. Olive's mother succumbed to drugs and alcohol and was simply not able to help Olive become a strong woman. Olive did that on her own, with her dad's teachings to guide her.

 

*** Spoilers ahead***

Page 327: "'I'll never know, but there is only one notation of three girls: Ara, Alma, and Addie Crooms. He wrote beside their names, Killed in a wagon accident, with a question mark. Their burial was the last time he did such terrible work. Perhaps he couldn't stomach it after that.'"

Olive has her dad's journal. This passage solves the mystery of the bones in the cave, but not so much what he had actually done in Mr. rich guy's employ.

Page 333 (Author's Note): "While the Horesthief Trail National Park in the book is fictional, its development, land mass, and historical features mirror those of the Winding Stair Mountain National Recreation Area . . . "

Makes me want to visit Oklahoma!

 

Page 337: "The guardian had, in total, court-sanctioned control over fifty-one allotment-wealthy children, many of whom he had no means of locating. Kate's department prosecuted the man and sought to regain the children's money and property. In the process, Kate and her small staff exposed a system of graft, greed, and political favors that included not only the guardians themselves, but everyone from local merchants to lawmen and probate court judges. Kate's attempts to put an end to the graft were foiled at every turn, and she was eventually steamrolled by forces more powerful than she could ever have imagined. After her second term, she was drummed out of office, her crusade silenced and left to fade."

Kate Barnard was not a familiar name to me and I love how Wingate used historical fact to enhance her story's intensity. It shouldn't shock and horrify me that people allow greed to be their (im)moral compass. How horrific to "adopt" children merely to steal their resources! A lot of times, reading this book made me think of what I learned when reading Rez Life.

Page 344 (Acknowledgements): "What lucky people we readers are that we live not just one life, but many, and diving into yet another is as easy as opening a book."

This is followed by her extensive bibliography. Wingate really does a lot of research for her books! One of the things I really liked about this book was the portrayal of Valerie's reality as a female park ranger in 1990. I wish we had learned more about her earlier life and what happened to her husband, but perhaps I just wasn't a careful enough reader.