Book Review: Shelterwood
A richly researched historical fiction novel, Lisa Wingate’s Shelterwood opens our eyes to a time in history that’s often overlooked
I was such a big fan of Lisa Wingate’s Before We Were Yours and The Book of Lost Friends that when I heard she was releasing a new novel in 2024, I immediately added it to my reading list without really knowing what it was about.
Shelterwood, which released in June 2024, is set in the fictional Horsethief Trail National Park near the (very real) Winding Stair Mountains of Oklahoma. Following Wingate’s traditional format—a plot device I tend to love in movies or books—it’s a story told in two time periods, with narrators trading off chapters to tell us their side of the story. Eventually, you know that the two stories will intersect in some way, and at least half the fun of reading the novel is trying to figure out how exactly that’s going to happen.
Shelterwood is set in both 1909 and 1990, with 11-year-old Olive Augusta Radley taking the narrator duties in the 1909 chapters and Ranger Valerie Boren-Odell leading the charge in 1990. While Ollie, as you’ll soon learn she’s called, is still a girl, she’s forthright and smart with a strong sense of right and wrong, characteristics she shares with Valerie. Ollie is running away from home after the death of her father. Tesco Peele, a no-good, mean-spirited man who aims to get whatever he wants, has moved in on Ollie’s mom, who has transformed from the bright, fun woman she used to be to a pale ghost of herself, ruled by opiates and alcohol. Before his death, Ollie’s father had taken in two Choctaw girls. While the older girl, Hester, has been missing for some time, Ollie takes the younger girl, Nessa, with her as they set out for the cabin in the mountains Ollie’s family had abandoned after her father’s death.
In the 1990s, Valerie Boren-Odell is a new ranger coming to serve at the newly opened Horsethief Trail National Park, located in much the same area that Ollie and Nessa were headed for all those years before. Valerie and her young son moved to Oklahoma from a stint at the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, and the new posting brings up a lot of old feelings about the death of Valerie’s husband, Joel, during a rescue in Yosemite where they were both rangers.
Using the split-time period plot device can be tricky—and I’m not sure that Wingates accomplishes this as successfully in Shelterwood as in previous novels. But in true Wingate fashion, her research is impeccable, and she sprinkles in historical elements that lend credence to her fiction.
In Shelterwood, she attempts to open her readers’ eyes to the mistreatment of Native Americans in the early 1900s, including the practice of becoming a “guardian” to Native Americans or their children in order to gain access to profitable land or oil leases. (This topic should sound familiar, as it’s similar to the topic explored in David Grann’s book and the Apple+ movie, Killers of the Flower Moon) Wingate also introduces real, historical figures, such as Kate Barnard, the first woman elected to a statewide office in Oklahoma, whose office coincidentally produced the first governmental investigative report of the Osage Indian murders detailed in Grann’s 2017 book.
I listened to audio versions of Wingate’s two previous books, The Book of Lost Friends and Before We Were Yours, but I read a print copy of Shelterwood. And for me, it was a bit harder to follow the time jumps and narrator shifts without also hearing that change. I also wasn’t as big of a fan of the 1909 chapters, and often found myself slowing down when I knew a 1909 chapter was coming to a close. There are a lot of reasons for that—many of which have nothing to do with the quality of Wingate’s storytelling or writing, but rather my own fear and trepidation to read about children in peril.
I recently told a friend who loves to read that Shelterwood is a slow burn. “I didn’t think I even liked it until I was three-fourths of the way through,” I said. Yet, by the end of the novel, in true Wingate fashion, Lisa had captivated me and I had to know what happened. While I think that the conclusion (and what happened to Ollie, Nessa and Hester) is tied up in a bit too nice of a bow, I think Shelterwood is still a novel worth reading, simply because it opens our eyes to a time in history we may want to forget or never knew happened.
The Bookery Rating: 📙📙📙
A solid addition to Lisa Wingate’s stable of historical fiction that opens our eyes to an era and a moment in history we may not have been aware of—but it’s not as captivating as her earlier novels, Before We Were Yours and The Book of Lost Friends.
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