Go as a River

 

Go as a River by Shelley Read

Fiction

2023 Spiegel & Grau

Finished on April 25, 2023

Rating: 3/5 (Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

In the spirit of Where the Crawdads Sing, and set amid the beauty and wilderness of the Colorado mountains, an unforgettable and deeply moving story of a young woman who follows her heart.

Seventeen-year-old Victoria Nash runs the household on her family's peach farm in the small ranch town of Iola, Colorado--the sole surviving female in a family of troubled men. Wilson Moon is a young drifter with a mysterious past, displaced from his tribal land but determined to live as he chooses.

Victoria's chance encounter with Wil on a street corner profoundly alters both of their young lives, igniting as much passion as danger. When tragedy strikes, Victoria leaves the only life she has ever known, fleeing into the nearby mountains. Taking shelter in a small hut, she struggles to survive in the wilderness, with no clear notion of what her future will be. As the seasons change, she also charts the changes in herself, finding in the natural world the strength and meaning that set her on a quest to regain all that she has lost, even as the Gunnison River rises to submerge her homeland--its ranches, farms, and the beloved peach orchard that has been in her family for generations.

Inspired by true events surrounding the destruction of the town of Iola in the 1960s, Go as a River is a story of deeply held love in the midst of hardship and loss, but also of finding courage, resilience, friendship, and finally, home--where least expected. This stunning debut explores what it means to lead your life as if it were a river--gathering and flowing, finding a way forward even when the river is dammed.

I first read about Shelley Read's debut novel early this year, and when I saw it on the new release shelf at the library, I decided to give it a try, knowing nothing about the premise of the story, only that several readers had given it a 5-star rating. I've been reading a lot of short novels this month and while this one (just over 300 pages) could have been read in a day or two, it took me a full week. I enjoy novels filled with lyrical detail, but too much detail becomes a distraction, or in this case, drags the narrative to a snail's pace. Unlike the beautiful descriptions of Beach Music (Pat Conroy), or the spare prose of Plainsong (Kent Haruf), Shelley Read's novel reminds me of Cold Mountain (Charles Frazier) in which Frazier devotes an entire page to a raindrop falling on a leaf (slight exaggeration, I admit). The first and last chapters of Go as a River, while filled with enough tension to keep me reading, are bookends to a plodding middle section in which Victoria leads a solitary existence with little interaction with others. I am not one to skim, but I was sorely tempted, eager to move on to the conclusion of the story. 

I have read numerous reviews stating this is "a stunning debut," "a beautifully descriptive novel," "a powerfully evocative story," and yet, once again, I'm in the minority.