Good Hope Road

Good Hope Road is one of Lisa Wingate’s earlier novels in her Tending Roses series, the connected family fiction project that established her as a name in Christian and crossover historical fiction. The series began with Tending Roses, the breakout novel that drew on Wingate’s own family experience and that has been read by many readers as a near memoir, and continued through Good Hope Road and several follow up books that traced the wider Vongortler family across generations.

This novel returns to the Vongortler family farm in the Missouri Ozarks after the events of the first book. Jenilee Lane is a young woman from the rural community surrounding the Vongortler farm, and her own family has been marked by the kind of difficult circumstances that the Ozarks of Wingate’s fiction often involve. When a tornado tears through the small town of Poetry, Missouri, killing residents and destroying property, Jenilee finds herself drawn into the recovery effort and into the wider Vongortler community that the disaster brings back together. The novel follows her slow movement from the margins of the community into something closer to belonging.

Lisa Wingate writes accessible faith inflected fiction that handles its religious elements with a light touch rather than overt evangelism. Her readership crosses over significantly with general historical fiction readers who may not share her faith perspective but appreciate her storytelling. The Ozark settings are rendered with affection, and the disaster recovery framework gives the novel its narrative momentum without becoming melodramatic.

What distinguishes Wingate’s earlier work from her later bestsellers like Before We Were Yours is the more domestic scope. Good Hope Road is not driven by a major historical mystery in the way her later books often are. It is closer to character driven family fiction, with the disaster recovery as the immediate plot and the longer arc of family healing as the underlying subject. The community of Poetry, the Vongortler family, and the slowly developing relationships between Jenilee and the various people who reach out to her give the book its emotional grounding.

For readers who came to Wingate through Before We Were Yours, going back to the Tending Roses series offers a different side of her work. For new readers, this is an accessible introduction to her gentler, more domestic fiction.