WHAT THE RIVER KEEPS
by Cheryl Grey Bostrom
A young woman finds love, faith, and freedom when she confronts the painful truth about her past in Bostrom’s novel.
Fisheries biologist Hildy Nybo grew up on her family’s fishing resort on the Elwha River near Olympic National Park in Washington state. She sometimes sees eerie “shadows” others can’t, and, doubting her own mind and memory, keeps detailed diaries and hoards strange keepsakes—stones, feathers, and yard-sale finds. Despite a successful scientific career, she lives like a hermit, with only a canary for company. When Hildy’s offered the dream job of lead project biologist with the ambitious Elwha River restoration project, she must return to the scene of past emotional traumas, including the disappearance of her beloved father when she was 14. Her unstable, hypercritical mother is falling into dementia, and the family business and property will be swept away forever in a couple of years when the Elwha Dam is demolished to allow salmon to return to their ancestral spawning grounds far upstream. Soon after returning home, she meets tall, handsome Luke, a former fisherman turned carpenter and farmer after the tragic deaths of his wife and young daughters on their boat. Luke is entranced by Hildy’s ethereal beauty and gentle spirit, and he patiently coaxes her out of her self-imposed isolation despite her many attempts to rebuff him. Navigating obstacles, sidetracks, misunderstandings, and shocking revelations, they slowly begin to trust in each other. Bostrom’s writing is vivid: Windshield wipers in a rainstorm “whapped like a terrier’s tail”; grieving Luke wears “suffering’s dark cloak.” The author deftly captures the way slight gestures can convey strong feelings and evokes the magnificence of the Olympic peninsula. As the four Bible verses cited before the book’s prologue suggest, Bostrom’s characters express a deeply held Christian faith. Though the trope of two damaged souls finding healing and romance in each other is nothing new, readers will find this version moving and satisfying.
A touching love story.