What the River Keeps
Cheryl Grey Bostrom
Publisher: Tyndale Fiction
Genre: Contemporary
Release August 12, 2025
Available Formats: Paperback, Audiobook, eBook

ISBN-10: 1496481585
ISBN-13: 978-1496481580

Book Summary:
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.

The cover image for the book What the River Keeps.

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About The Author

For most of her life, Pacific Northwest naturalist, photographer, and author Cheryl Grey Bostrom has lived in the rural and wild lands that infuse her writing. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, currently including her column in the American Scientific Affiliation’s God and Nature Magazine and her blog: Watching Nature, Seeing Life. Now under the Tyndale imprint, her debut novel Sugar Birds has won multiple industry awards—with an ACFW Carol Award, Christianity Today's Fiction Award of Merit, Christy Finalist Honors, and American Fiction, Best Book, Reader's Favorite, Nautilus Silver and International Book Awards among them.

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