*Review* Go As a River by Shelley Read

 

Genre: Historical Fiction

Published: February 28, 2023

Pages: 321

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 and determined to live as he chooses.

Victoria encounters Wil by chance on a street corner, a meeting that 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 surrounding mountains, where she struggles to survive in the wilderness with no clear notion of what her future will bring. As the seasons change, she also charts the changes in herself, finding in the beautiful but harsh landscape the meaning and strength to move forward and rebuild all that she has lost, even as the Gunnison River threatens 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 face 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 a river is dammed.

I won a copy of this book through the Goodreads First Reads giveaway program. I read it now because one of my eight book clubs selected it for our September meeting. This is my honest review. 

I really struggled to feel invested in this story. Like it tool me longer to finish than it should have because I never got to the point where I just didn't want to put the book down. The most intriguing part of the book was the letter, and that doesn't even appear until the last third of the book. 

I think one of my big problems is the book felt unrealistically overly descriptive. The main character is 17 to start with and not very smart because she never went to high school, but is giving long, lyrical descriptions of her farm, town, and the mountains. For me, that felt tedious and inauthentic. Add in that I couldn't really relate to a farm girl in the 1950s and it was just a recipe for a bad book for me. 

Overall I give Go As a River 2.376 out of 5 stars. - Katie 

Amazon

An Amazon Editor's Pick Best Debut 2023 and Goodreads Choice Award Nominee, Shelley Read's internationally bestselling novel, Go As A River, is being translated into over thirty languages and has been optioned for film by Mazur Kaplan in partnership with Fifth Season. Shelley was a Senior Lecturer at Western Colorado University for nearly three decades where she was a founder of the Environment & Sustainability major and the PRIME program for at-risk students. She holds degrees in writing and literary studies from the University of Denver and Temple University's Graduate Program in Creative Writing and is a regular contributor to Crested Butte Magazine and Gunnison Valley Journal. Shelley is a fifth generation Coloradoan who lives with her family in the Elk Mountains of the Western Slope.