June 2024
I know little about Eastern Oklahoma, and I never have traveled there. But after reading SHELTERWOOD by Lisa Wingate, I would love to see this part of the country.
The book is set in two time frames. In 1909, we meet 11-year-old Olive Augusta Radley, who knows that the two Choctaw girls boarded in their home as wards are not safe around her stepfather. The older girl disappears, and shortly after, Ollie flees to the woods with the younger girl. After the passage of the Dawes Act, which gave every Indian man, woman and child land, the youngest of these inheritors were preyed upon by men who wanted to lay claim to their oil rights. Children were hidden in the woods in places like the Winding Stair Mountains. There they would forage for food and protect one another, setting up their own systems of order in which the older children would watch out for the younger ones.
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