A Thousand Voices is the fifth and final novel in Lisa Wingate’s Tending Roses series.

Dell Jordan was a side character in the first couple of books but is the main character in this one. She was Grandma Rose’s neighbor as a child, living with an ailing grandmother. Her father had not been around since her birth. Her mother had been in and out with drug addictions but died a few years before. After she and Grandma Rose became friends, she became an unofficial part of the family until Rose’s granddaughter and her husband, Karen and James, officially adopted Dell.

When Dell was discovered to be something of a musical prodigy, Karen enrolled her in a performing arts magnet school. Dell had trouble adjusting, but eventually found her way.

As this story begins, Dell graduated two years earlier, spent one year touring Europe with an orchestra, and a second year working in a Ukrainian mission orphanage. Her parents and teachers want her to apply to Julliard. But the appeal of music has faded with the pressures of performance and expectations.

She loves her new family, but she still feels “different,” with her brown eyes and hair and “cinnamon” skin amidst everyone else’s fair skin, blue eyes, and blond hair. She grieves over her birth father’s desertion, her birth mother’s neglect, and the derogatory comments from her uncle.

All she knows about her father is his name on her birth certificate and the fact that he was part Choctaw. When she learns about agencies in Oklahoma that help find Choctaw ancestors, she drives there from Kansas City to see if she can find any information about her father. She doesn’t tell her adoptive parents, feeling they wouldn’t understand and might be hurt.

After a series of mishaps in her travels, including losing most of her money, she arrives at a campground and sleeps in her car. A large group of tents and motor homes in the next campsite hold an extended Choctaw family, there for the annual Choctaw festival. They invite Dell into their gathering, where she becomes friends with several of them and feels a sense of belonging that she has never experienced before. A couple of them help her in her search.

A few quotes that stood out to me:

It’s a powerful thing to realize you were put in this world on purpose. It changes the way you feel about everything afterward (p. 2, Kindle version).

The past, even if you don’t talk about it, still exists, and no matter how hard you try to turn your back, no matter how dangerous it is to look at, part of you cries out to understand it.

Part of growing up is learning that people can’t give what they don’t have. The rest you have to find in yourself (p. 310).

The plot moves rather slowly until the last couple of chapters. There are some scenes that don’t seem to advance the plot at all, like a lengthy encounter with a skunk at the campground.

I was frustrated with Dell’s lying to her parents concerning her whereabouts, especially since she also lied to them in the previous book about her problems at school.

I wondered if Lisa intended for the series to lead to Dell’s journey from the beginning, or if Dell’s story emerged along the way. Apparently, the latter scenario was the case. Lisa said in the discussion questions at the end that the first book in the series was written with no thought of a sequel. But readers’ questions as well as her own musings about the characters grew into subsequent books. She also says there, “Dell was, in many ways, the catalyst for change in Grandma Rose’s family, and in turn she was changed by Grandma Rose’s family.”

I also wondered if Dell was originally thought of as Native American. She has always been described as having cinnamon-colored skin, but in a previous book, her uncle uses a different racial epithet about her. I wasn’t sure if that was just to show his ignorance, or if Lisa switched gears about what race Dell was part of.

I was dismayed by minced oaths (like “Geez”), language that was not profanity but also was not polite, and especially a bawdy description of an old woman whose robe had come undone. On the one hand, the people involved didn’t profess to be Christians. On the other hand, that was conveyed well enough without those elements. Because of this, the sheen of Wingate’s appeal has been a little tarnished for me.

It was interesting to read of Choctaw history. If this is an accurate representation, it seems that, among modern Choctaw, some are really into their heritage while others are not.

I thought the last couple of chapters were the best in the book. My heart went out to Dell in her struggles.

I know some don’t like neatly-wrapped-up-in-a-bow endings. But this book had more loose threads than I like. I would have enjoyed an epilogue, if not one more chapter.