Go As A River

Author: Shelley Read

Publisher: DoubleDay

Available: 13^th April 2023 in Hardback, eBook & Audiobook

Thank you to Anne Cater, Random Things Tours & Double Day for my gifted copy and for having me on the blog tour for this book. My review is based on my experience of the book and any thoughts expressed here are solely mine alone. 

Book Details:

In this soaring, compassionate novel, a breath-taking picture of our natural world – its trees and mountains and light – emerges. But more than this, it is the tale of female resilience and becoming that gives Go As A River its strength, its soul, and its possibility.

Nestled in the foothills of the Elk Mountains and surrounded by sprawling forests, wandering bears and porcupine, the Gunnison River rushes by the tiny town of Iola.

On a cool autumn morning, seventeen year old Torie Nash heads into her village pulling a rickety wagon filled with late-season peaches from her farm.  As she nears an intersection, a mysterious young drifter with eyes dark and shiny as a raven’s wing, grimy thumbs, and smudged cheeks, stops to ask her the way. She could have turned left or crossed over, but she did not.  She stayed.  ‘Go as a river,’ he whispers to her. 

So begins a mesmerising story that unfolds over a lifetime, as Torie attempts to absorb and follow his words.

Gathering all the pieces of her small, extraordinary life, spinning through the eddies of desire, heartbreak, and betrayal, embracing, and challenged by the landscape she calls home, Torie arrives at a single rocky decision that changes her life forever. 

My Thoughts:

It’s my turn today on the blog tour for Shelley Read’s debut novel Go As A River. This is without question a tender, tantalising, tragic and triumphal book, that from the moment you turn the first pages; the words written there resonate with a melodic majesty as the prologue describes the silent watery entombed town of Iola, Colorado, and the farm where Victoria or Torie as she was then, once lived…the essence of the past, rises to embrace the reader and the route to becoming begins.

There is resolute, eerie enchantment to the opening of this novel which immediately pique’s your interest and insistently filled my mind, with a number of questions. I read on with the hopeful expectation my questions, might be answered along the way. I enjoyed the simple, sweeping elegant cadence of Shelley’s prose and the sense of familiarity she conjures with the context of her story of a young woman, meeting a handsome boy and that exciting, confusing anticipatory tingling connection. The story opens in post war rural Colorado, where societal nuances and expectations are followed unquestioned and there is a dark nonchalance to the community’s inherent racism/bigotry and the whispered distancing of its populace from those who do not fit the mould.

Torie is a dutiful farmer’s daughter, running the home, planting her kitchen garden, harvesting the produce, cooking, and cleaning, and helping with the peach harvest, serving at the family’s peach stand, this thankless domestic duty is her life…since the early death of her mother. She is a girl on the cusp of womanhood, labouring to secure the comfort of the negligent men in her household! Her own desires and dreams are nothing more than that…until she meets Wilson Moon and begins to view the world differently, much to the disgust of her brother…who is truly vile, but I leave you to discover why for yourselves!

We get to omnisciently follow the beautiful trajectory of their falling in love and budding relationship, culminating in adversity for them both, differently. Watching Torie, discover she is carrying Wil’s child and knowing, it will not be welcome at the farm. She courageously, makes a plan and alone heads for the mountains, to a remote, isolated cabin, which was once Wil’s hiding spot and their place of sanctuary. Here among the comfort and familiarity of the mountains and trees, Torie plans to wait out her pregnancy and alone, she gives birth to their son! And you begin to hope, that she and her baby Blue, could forge a life for themselves, in this beautiful wilderness but Mother Nature can be cruel and a snowstorm, decimates their food source and Torie is faced with starvation or returning to town! She then makes the hardest decision any woman can face, but she does it anyway and the in next part of the book, we continue with the aftermath. Torie survival of her physical and emotional trauma; as she builds a life for herself, and leaves the girl she was as Torie behind and becomes the woman, Victoria she is now; a successful peach farmer, keeping alive her family legacy despite social political turbulence and the grasping avarice of her brother Seth! Victoria in the face of everything, continues on, making further tough life altering decisions and her endurance and power comes into its own but the scars of her turbulent past remain vivid despite the passing of time and she keeps her life before, to herself, like ‘a locked diary‘.

The pivotal moment in this story, also introduces us to another remarkable woman, Inga Tate. Whose life and plans have also been up ended by a man, romance and a pregnancy but having no other option but to adhere to acceptable societal didacts, she marries and has her child and coincidental circumstances, place her in the right place at the right time. I think the only way to describe it (without giving anything away, I hope) is that Inga and Torie, reach one of life’s crossroads precisely when they need to, although they do not meet! When you read this book, I think you’ll see what I mean! You will also find out what the connection between them is and she, the progression of life and time from Inga’s point of view and that story line is not for me to reveal here!

Shelley wealds her pen to illustrate, the majestic Colorado landscape and its flora and fauna as magnificently as the Hudson School artists, Albert Bierstadt or Frederic Edwin Church painted their stunning pictures of wild American landscapes, with craggy mountains or torrential waterfalls, . Shelley paints images of Victoria and Inga’s lives with her words. She brings an evocative, elucidation of time and place, making informed topical observations on controversial issues of the time; from the treatment of indigenous Americans and their land to governmental policy that destroyed unique environments all the in the name of progress. To an inherent understanding of the roles, expectations, trials, and tribulations of women in society during the post war era.

Go As A River has already been compared favourably to Delia Owen’s novel Where the Crawdads Sing. And I can see why, Shelley’s book is equally as beautifully and gracefully written, with sublime tangible atmospheric detailing, which as a reader, makes you feel, as if you are walking in the wild, listening to chorus of the trees, feeling the stones and earth beneath your feet, alongside protagonist Victoria. However, I personally feel that this does both novels a small disservice, as for me, both writers have wholly unique voices and their novels in context and construction are subtly different. If there are comparisons to be made between them, then they are only in the positive, the novels similarities are really only that they have a quiet, dignified but remarkable female lead, who endures the dissention of family and community and that their stories, capture the essence of lives, so completely unlike most of our own.

Shelley’s book is eloquent storytelling at its finest, intelligently sophisticated in its powerful construction, sociality progressive and astute in its topical observations and if it isn’t obvious already, I absolutely loved it. This novel’s power and poignancy is potently blended and it has one of the best endings, I’ve enjoyed in a while and one that will certainly promote a level of debate for all who read it. This is most definitely a novel in my bookish opinion that you should want to add to your library, as soon as possible! 

Happy Reading Bookophiles

About the Author:

Shelley Read is a fifth generation Coloradoan who lives with her family in the Elk Mountains of the Western Slope. She was a Senior Lecturer at Western Colorado University for nearly three decades, where she taught writing, literature, environmental studies, and Honours, and was a founder of the Environment & Sustainability major and a support program for first-generation and at-risk students. Shelley holds degrees in writing and literary studies from the University of Denver and Temple University’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing. She is a regular contributor to Crested Butte Magazine and Gunnison Valley Journal and has written for the Denver Post and a variety of publications.

Go As A River, her first novel, is inspired by the landscape she comes from and will be published in over thirty territories.

Please do read some of the other reviews available on this blog tour.