PILIPINTO

A child of missionaries shares her adventures growing up in the Amazon in this children’s memoir.

The author was born in the Amazon in 1955 to American evangelical missionary parents Jim and Elisabeth Elliot, whose lives she detailed in her previous book, Devotedly (2019). This memoir for children details her time as a child in Ecuador, which included a family tragedy when she was still an infant. Shepard tells the story in the third person, narrating the first several years of her life. Her parents mainly worked with the Quechua people, but they were intrigued by the Waoroni people, who had almost no contact with those outside of their own tribe. Jim ventured out with a group to meet with local Waoroni people as part of their missionary work; there, he and other members of the group were killed. Valerie and her mother spent three more years with the Quechua; eventually, they got to know a Waoroni woman who invited the pair to live with her people; she assured Valerie’s mother that they would be safe, so Valerie and her mother headed out on what would be their greatest adventure. This story is told from the narrow third-person perspective of Valerie and her mother, such that the Indigenous peoples seem robbed of some of their agency. At one point, for example, Valerie asks her mother, “How can the Indians find a dry spot on the bank in the darkness?” Her mother simply replies, “God is taking care of them!” The Waoroni also appear to unquestioningly accept Christianity despite having been so isolationist in the past, which goes unexplained. Still, the story provides many interesting anecdotes of life in the rainforest. That said, after the death of a sick Quechua child, the memoir abruptly ends without completing any clear arc for its characters.

A somewhat informative but unevenly executed remembrance for young Christian readers.