What We Take For Truth

What We Take for Truth is the story of a young woman who finds her strength when the world around her crumbles. It is a timely tale about shifting loyalties and the painful choices we are forced to make in order to preserve what we value most.

As this novel opens, it is 1990 and Grace Tillman, who has lived all her life in the tiny logging town of Prosperity, Washington, has just graduated from high school and is facing a very uncertain future. The spotted owl controversy is about to destroy her world before she has had her chance to learn who she is and what it means to be a part of this community.

Grace is an orphan, her mother gone since she was four and her father killed by an erratically cut cedar three years before the story opens. She has set her sights on moving to the city and turning her back on all she’s known when she meets Charlie Roberge, an independent log truck driver willing to break the law to hold on to his way of life. Charlie’s arrival in Prosperity is both a homecoming and a desperate grab at a lifeline. Though the bed of his Peterbilt is empty, he is bringing with him a secret that will challenge both his and Grace’s sense of identity and ultimately teach them about the complexities of loyalty, love, and loss. In the process, Grace will find herself as an artist and an independent woman in a world where neither is welcome.

At its height, the world of logging in the Pacific Northwest was both brutal and beautiful. When the conservation movement sent protestors into the woods and the government began to place the needs of a small, shy bird above those of families who had lived for generations off the harvest of those woods, the conflicts that erupted were fierce and heartbreaking. What We Take for Truth tells a story that both defends a way of life that is dying and celebrates a landscape that is being lost.