The #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Lost Friends and Before We Were Yours explores the connection between our hearts and our pasts in this emotional novel in the Tending Roses series....
Once trapped in a world of poverty and neglect, Dell Jordan knows she was one of the lucky ones. Adopted at thirteen, she was loved, mentored, and encA woman struggling to find her way forward discovers hope in her bond with a troubled young girl in this heartfelt novel in the Tending Roses series from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Lost Friends and Before We Were Yours.
Once a gifted ballet dancer, Julia Costell understands the joy of body and soul lost in a perfect moment. But after buckling under the demands of a professional dance career, she’s landed with a thud in an unglamorous job as a guidance counselor at a performing arts school. Living back home with her parents and feeling lost, Julia is afraid she’ll never soar again—until the day young Dell Jordan is sent to her office.
In Dell’s writing, Julia recognizes not only her own despair, but also luminous sparks of hope. But as Julia fights to forge a brighter future for one disadvantaged student, she is drawn into startling undercurrents of conflict and denial within the academy. Now, as she is tested in ways she never imagined, Julia begins to discover that even though her life has seemed off course, she’s been on the right path all along...ouraged to pursue her passion for music. By twenty, her future has expanded in exciting new directions—a year abroad with a traveling symphony, teaching music to orphans in Ukraine, and applying for a scholarship to Julliard. But underneath Dell’s smoothly polished surface lurk mysteries from the past. Why did her mother abandon her? Who was her father? Are there faces somewhere that look like hers—blood relatives she’s never met?
Determined to find answers, and unable to share her emotional uncertainty with her adoptive family, Dell sets off on a secret journey into Oklahoma’s Kiamichi Mountains. Drawn by the only remaining link to her origins—a father’s Native American name on her birth certificate—she travels into quiet wooded valleys, into the heart of the modern Choctaw Nation. There she will find connections to a long and proud heritage and begin to answer the questions of her heart. In the voices of her ancestors, she’ll discover the keys to a future unlike anything she could have imagined.
