Cheryl Grey Bostrom ’80 MA English
Tyndale House Publishers: 2025
A successful biologist with passion for wild fish of the Pacific Northwest, Hildy Nybo keeps it together professionally. Her private life is another matter.
She fears she’s losing her mind, or at least her memory. As a child, she constantly misplaces things, even her most treasured possessions, unable to recall where she might have left them. As an adult, she obsessively collects keepsakes and writes down the details of her daily doings in diaries, both in hopes of preserving — and, if necessary, jarring — her memory.
As her mother’s own memory fails and overall health declines, Hildy returns to her childhood home on the Olympic Peninsula, accepting a job to help restore the Elwha River after the demolition of two century-old dams. Living in a cabin at her family’s rustic riverside resort, the haunting holes in her history seem to resurface.
When a local artist rents a nearby cabin to use as a pottery study, her carpenter brother Luke, a few years removed from his own personal trauma, starts hanging around and slowly tearing down the walls Hildy has built around her heart. Luke recognizes it will take time for the young recluse — fragile and a little naive, yet also stubborn and stronger than she knows — to let him in. But will she ever be able to piece together her perplexing past and free herself from its confines?
What the River Keeps follows Cheryl Grey (Hobson) Bostrom’s 2021 debut novel Sugar Birds and 2024 sequel Leaning on Air, carrying similar themes: family, forgiveness, science, Christian spirituality, redemption, and the beauty and mystery of Washington state’s natural world. It’s both a love story and a story of learning to let go. Bostrom masterfully weaves together two different perspectives, alternating chapters from the points of view of both Hildy and Luke. Her prose—delicately nuanced, wholly seductive—unfolds cinematically and sings.