Welcome to Friday Reads!
There’s a giveaway for a print copy of What the River Keeps by Cheryl Grey Bostrom, courtesy of the publisher. (US ONLY!) Enter by using the Rafflecopter link at the bottom of the post. (Contest ends August 22, 2025.) If you’re the chosen winner, I’ll contact you for your information to pass along to the publisher.
About the book…
Hildy Nybo is a successful biologist, her study of the Pacific Northwest’s wild fish both a passion and a career. But behind her professional brilliance, Hildy’s reclusive private life reflects a childhood fraught with uncertainty. Despite her father’s love and her mother’s sympathy, she grew up constantly losing even her most cherished belongings, unable to recall where she misplaced them. Haunted by the confusion of those early years, she now records her life in detailed diaries and clings tightly to memory-prompting keepsakes.
Then her mother’s health fails, and Hildy accepts a job near her childhood home, joining a team of scientists who will help restore her beloved Elwha River after the demolition of two century-old dams. There Hildy settles into one of the cabins on her family’s rustic resort―a place she both loves and dreads, for reasons she can’t fully explain.
When local artist Miranda Rimmer rents an adjacent cabin for her pottery studio, Hildy shrinks from such a close neighbor. But then Miranda’s carpenter brother, Luke, shows up to help with construction and captures Hildy’s attention. Now a few years beyond a tragedy that brought him to his knees, Luke recognizes a kindred soul in Hildy, and they build a relationship that dismantles the walls Hildy’s built to keep people out. As troubling pieces of the past surface, Hildy dares to wonder if she can banish the shadows that have burdened her and follow her river’s course to freedom.
Excerpt…
PROLOGUE
HILDY
FISH
ELWHA RIVER VALLEY, WASHINGTON STATE
1985
On her tenth birthday, Hildy Nybo was casting a spinner under the Elwha River bridge when a streak of silver broke the surface. She whistled softly and pointed as the fish flicked its tail and disappeared into the pool’s shaded depths.
Upstream, her father glanced, then threaded a night crawler onto a hook’s shank. “I saw him.” He raised his brow, aimed the hook toward the river like a dare.
The fingertips working Hildy’s reel stalled, and she eyed the water, rapt. “They hush me, Daddy. Every fish I see.”
“I noticed,” he said. “Why, you think?”
She gazed into the water, considering. “It’s like . . . like if I’m talking, I’ll miss their music. It’s like they’re all little banjos, and somebody’s strumming happiness on ’em.”
She didn’t notice her dad approach until he palmed her blonde head. Then he lifted his chin toward the forested foothills rimming their family’s fishing resort, where the river entered sapphire Lake Aldwell. “Could be you’re hearing his riffs.”
“Whose riffs?”
“Your Banjo- Strummer. The Fish- Maker, Tree- Maker. Same, same.” Dad shrugged, then thrust the tip of his rod toward his workshop like a band conductor’s baton. “The music’s in heartwood and burls for me, but maybe you’ll hear him best through fish.”
Hildy bobbed her line to her dad’s words, sending concentric circles from the thin filament into the current. Would she? She’d love nothing more.
At bedtime, Hildy mentioned to her mother how she thought she met God through fish.
“That imagination of yours,” Momma said. “If you know what’s good for you, Hildy Rose, you won’t mention that notion to a living soul.” Violet fingered Hildy’s braid with busy fingers, then crouched to eye level as she tucked the blankets. “Stick to facts, daughter. No more fiction. If you spread that God-fish story around the playground . . .”
Hildy read hopeless in the wag of her mother’s head.
She bit her lip, squeezed her eyebrows together. “But Dad said—”
“He’s pretending with you, as usual. Indulging that fantasy world of yours. You’re ten now, Hildy. Old enough to give it up. You can’t live on fairy tales.”
Violet turned off the bedside lamp, but her voice found Hildy in the dark. “You don’t want classmates to shun you again, do you, honey?”
No, I don’t. Hildy curled toward the wall. Pulled the blankets to her chin.
“Let her be, Vi.” Her dad’s voice came from the hall. Seconds later, his hand touched Hildy’s shoulder, and she rolled toward him. His lips pressed her forehead before he stroked it. “Those banjos you told me about today? Keep listening, sweetheart. That mind of yours is a gift.”
She nodded. Closed her eyes against confusion.
A gift? She couldn’t imagine how. Her ideas made kids avoid her and, worse, made Momma unhappy, something she didn’t want, ever. If not for Momma . . . well, what would she do without her mother telling her which thoughts were right, or what to say or keep secret?
This time, Momma knew that if Hildy mentioned God and salmon in the same breath at school, everyone would call her Fish Girl—not just a few. Peers would mumble about her more than when she’d brought those trout gills for show-and-tell or wrote that report on the stabilizing properties of dorsal fins.
Even so, warmed by kindness at their next Sunday meeting, Hildy almost, almost told the group that Scripture verses reached her heart best when she thought about fish. The Lord on that cross? How better to illustrate than with iridescent salmon returning upstream, dying for their spawn? She raised her hand, nearly bursting with awe over her epiphany until, from across the circle, her mother caught her eye.
Violet pinched her lips and twitched a no. Instantly, a dark form Hildy sometimes saw around their house climbed her mother’s back and draped her like a heavy shawl. Hildy dropped her raised hand to her lap and cowered, scarcely breathing until it slid away.
She had to tell Momma. Outside, while Dad went for the car and her sister talked to friends, Hildy whispered to her.
Her mother crouched nose to nose. “Stop, Hildy. I mean it. Make-believe is one thing when you’re little, but at ten? Ten? One more wacked word to anyone about that creepy shadow and I’ll . . .”
Dad pulled the car to the curb, so Momma didn’t finish, but Hildy saw her eyes. On the ride home, the girl made two vows. First, she would never again mention this thing no one else could see. Second, she would keep the Fish-Maker to herself, too.
Adapted from What The River Keeps by Cheryl Grey Bostrom. Copyright © 2025. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, a Division of Tyndale House Ministries. All rights reserved.
About Cheryl…
A keen student of the natural world and the workings of the human heart, Pacific Northwest author Cheryl Grey Bostrom captures the mystery and wonder of both in her lyrical, surprising fiction.
Her novels Sugar Birds (Christy finalist, Amazon bestseller, and Book of the Year) and Leaning on Air have won more than two dozen industry honors, among which are Christianity Today’s Fiction Award of Merit and American Fiction, Reader’s Favorite, ACFW Carol, Nautilus, Best Book, IPPY, Foreword Indies, and International Book Awards. Kirkus Reviews named Cheryl’s newest work of contemporary women’s fiction, What the River Keeps, as a Best Indies Book of June 2025.
An avid birder and nature photographer, Cheryl lives in rural Washington State with her husband and a pack of half-trained Gordon setters.
Rules for the giveaway can be found here.
I think the premise sounds really interesting, and a little scary. Should definitely keep my interest!
Good luck, Candice!
Sounds intriguing and interesting.
I agree. Good luck, Heather!
premise
Good luck!
I think it sounds very intriguing!!
I agree, Trudy. Good luck!