"warm character study"

In Kansas, Dell Jordan was adopted by loving mentoring parents when she was thirteen years old. Her new family encouraged her to study music and she proved to be very talented. After high school Dell toured Europe playing with an orchestra and performed humanitarian volunteer work in the Ukraine. Coming home to Kansas after over a year abroad, a scholarship to Juilliard awaits the nineteen year old.

However, Dell has issues that her work at the Ukrainian orphanage has her pondering. She needs to know why her biological mother deserted her and who sired her. She travels to Oklahoma as she knows her father is a member of the Choctaw Nation. In the Sooner State, Dell meets the Reids and is especially attracted to widower Jace Reid, a history teacher raising two young children.

Dell's quest keeps the tale focused as she (and readers) learns much about the modern day Choctaw Nation. Her attraction to Jace and his kids enhance her quest to know who she comes from as she admires the teacher for being a single parent raising his children with love. Lisa Wingate provides a warm character study of a fully developed individual seeking her roots.

Harriet Klausner

Reviewed by Harriet Klausner
Posted July 24, 2007

Summary

Adopted at thirteen, Dell Jordan was loved, mentored, and encouraged to pursue her passion for music. Now, at twenty, after a year abroad with a traveling symphony, a scholarship to Julliard is within reach. 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, 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. In the voices of her Choctaw ancestors, she'll discover the keys to a future unlike anything she could have imagined.