A while back I read Henry’s novel Losing the Moon and although I had misgivings when I started the novel, it won me over in the end. Sadly, I can’t say the same about Where the River Runs. I wanted to like it, I really did…but I just had so many problems with it.

Where the River Runs is the story of Meridy Dresden, lawyer’s wife and mother to a teenage son, BJ. She has a strained relationship with her mother and sister and a big secret that she’s kept since the summer she graduated from high school and her boyfriend, Danny, was killed in a fire. When she’s asked to write a curriculum based on Gulluh (descendants of African slaves) culture, she goes back to her childhood home to interview Tulu, her childhood housekeeper.

What this novel expects us to believe is that 20 years after the tragic fire that killed Danny,  Meridy’s best childhood friend, Tim, is being asked to pay for the damage to an old historically significant cottage that burned down. The novel also asks us to believe that people’s strained family relations can be miraculously resolved over iced tea on the porch. Meridy’s struggle to reconcile her past was real enough except that the secret she built her life around was ridiculously inconsequential.  I just didn’t buy into her angst. It all seemed contrived and convenient and forced.

For me, the best parts of Where the River Runs were the Gulluh sayings at the start of every chapter. Things like Death is one ditch you cannot jump and the heart doesn’t mean everything the mouth says.

Where the River Runs is part of the New American Library Accent series, novels which are meant to touch on subjects close to a woman’s heart, or as the tag line says: “Fiction for the way we live.” I don’t know anyone who lives this way.

Didn’t like this one at all…read Losing the Moon instead.

Elizabeth Cox’s novel The Slow Moon was a huge disappointment to me. I was really looking forward to reading it but it turned out to be really, really mediocre.

Central to the story is the relationship between Crow, 16,  (the son of wealthy, well-respected parents) and Sophie, 14, (daughter of a widow). The story opens as they sneak off from a high school party to have some alone-time in the woods. Crow and Sophie really like each other and they have decided that they want to take their relationship to the next level. The next level requires condoms though, and Crow has forgotten those in his truck. He leaves Sophie alone to retrieve them and she is brutally attacked.

This rape isn’t enough for Cox to make a meal on, however. So instead of giving us any real insight into how Sophie feels and how Crow, wrongfully accused, feels, she fills the novel with a bunch of stupid subplots: Crow’s parent’s cracked marriage, his father’s infidelity, his mother’s pre-marriage pregnancy (so the man who Crow thinks is his Dad, isn’t his Dad.) Crow’s best friends all have their own problems – one is trying to come to terms with the fact that he may be gay, another finds out the father he thought was dead is actually in prison.

And can I just say a word about the writing.  What 14 and 16 year olds (loss of innocence not withstanding) actually “like[d] examining the frailty of others.” (294)  The novel is filled with passages like this: “Another car went by, throwing light onto the walls and ceiling, and the light felt heavy, like a horse running fast into his room; the threat of being crushed came to his mind.” (247) Um, what?

Jodi Picoult’s endorsement on the front of the book says “I found myself pausing over the beauty of this book, and wishing I’d been the one to think of it.” Jodi, honey, you did think of it and you wrote it and called it The Tenth Circle. That book is infinitely better.