While perhaps not as flashy as its set-in-the-natural-world predecessor Where the Crawdads Sing, Shelley Read’s debut Go As A River is start to finish even more satisfying. (I hated the ending of Owens’s book.)
Victoria ‘Torie’ Nash is just seventeen when her story begins. She lives with her mostly silent father, mean-spirited and trouble-making 15-year-old brother, Seth, and Uncle Og, a wheel-chair bound war veteran, on a peach farm in Colorado . Yes, you heard that right: a peach farm in Colorado.
Our farm was nothing special, nor was it very big, just forty-seven acres including the barns and the house and a gravel driveway as long as a wolf’s howl. But from the barn to the back fence line our land produced the only peach grove in all Gunnison County, where the fruit grew fat and rosy and sweet.
Torie has already experienced tragedy and her life is relatively sheltered – consisting of tending to the house and garden, preparing meals for her family and farmhands, and working in the orchard. Then, one day, she meets Wilson Moon and that “was a fateful moment.” Anyone who has ever fallen in love at that age will recognize the signs.
…I knew nothing, especially not of love’s beginnings, of that inexplicable draw to another, why some boys could pass you by without notice but the next has a pull on you as undeniable as gravity, and from that moment forward, longing is all you know.
Soon Torie and Wil are meeting every chance they get and for the first time in her life, Torie feels seen and understood. But, of course, their relationship is not without its difficulties. For one thing – it’s 1948. For another, Wil is Indian and a drifter. But with Wil, Torie feels “beautiful and desirable and even a little dangerous […] a woman making choices and taking risks rather than an obedient and timid girl.”
Torie becomes Victoria through a variety of heartbreaking trials. The novel spans 20 years, but it never feels rushed or over-stuffed. For a quiet novel, I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough. I was so invested in Victoria’s story and her tenacity. She is a fully realized character whose journey is so beautifully rendered -well, I won’t be forgetting her any time soon.
Read captures the landscape, small-town life, first love, and what it is to be misunderstood and ‘other’ with a deft hand. It is clear she has a deep and abiding love for the natural world: I could smell and taste those peaches. The story was inspired, in part, by a true event – the flooding of a town in the 1960s to facilitate the building of a dam. (Another great book – and one that takes place in my neck of the woods – that turns on an event like this is The Town That Drowned by Riel Nason).
I highly recommend this book; it’s definitely in my Top 5 reads of the year.
Emily Chenoweth’s debut novel Hello Goodbye was inspired by the author’s life. Her mother was diagnosed with a brain tumour when Chenoweth was in her first year of college. Instead of writing a memoir, though, the author decided to use her experiences as fodder for a work of fiction because she could “explore the feelings and experiences that I did remember, but I could also craft a story that had a different arc than my own.”
of a man and woman who meet by chance at Heathrow airport. Over a drink, the man reveals that he thinks that his wife is having an affair and he wants to kill her – which may be a bit of an extreme reaction, but there you go. The woman offers to help the man’s fantasy become a reality and the novel does not let up from there.
One last book you should add to your tbr pile is M.O. Walsh’s debut 
And then there’s The Roanoke Girls by Amy Engel. Can’t remember when I bought it or how long it’s been languishing on my tbr shelf, but I started reading it and finished reading it in just a few hours because it has ALL THE THINGS I love in a book. (Lots of other reviewers loved all the things, too, because this book received lots of well-
specifically when I first watched it, but it came out in 1970 and I probably saw it shortly after that. I have it on VHS somewhere, but no longer have a VHS machine. I did, however, have the book.
That’s what Scott and Cath do in Michael Kun and Susan Mullen’s epistolary novel We Are Still Tornadoes. Cath has gone off to Wake College in North Carolina, but Scott has stayed home. He’s currently working in his father’s men’s clothing store – a job that is the subject of much derision until it’s not.
I was very excited to read Sepetys’s latest book, The Fountains of Silence, because I just knew that I was going to meet a new cast of characters to fall in love with, and I wasn’t wrong.
those books from my childhood that has stayed with me and that I often recommend to students in my class, based solely on my hazy memories of having loved it. So, now, 45 years after reading it for the first time, I have finally finished spending some more time with one of literature’s most beloved characters, Frances (Francie) Nolan.
The Ludic Reader 