Shelley Read’s debut begins when 17-year-old Victoria, a peach farmer’s daughter, encounters Wilson Moon, a Native-American drifter, on a street corner in Iola, Colorado. In that instant, she discovers how “the exceptional lurks beneath the ordinary”.
Having lost her mother and aunt, Victoria is the only female in a household of men: a grieving father, bitter wheelchair-bound veteran uncle and trouble-seeking older brother. Victoria herself displays an uncommon psychological sensitivity.
After racist bigotry drives her into the sharpest extremes of love and grief, she hides out in a remote hunting cabin. Over months, Victoria learns survival skills – her only reference points: the wilderness and the weather.
Her home is abandoned when she eventually returns. To escape her pain and solitude, she commits to relocating the farm’s peach orchard before it drowns – an immense project, conveyed with fascinating botanical accuracy.
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Over the following years, an irrevocable act continues to haunt her.
Loosely based on true events, the novel spans the years between 1948 and 1971. A prologue adds context with the building of the Blue Mesa Reservoir, which entailed flooding the valley and, with it, Iola. As the story unfolds, the fracturing of lives and landscapes intersects.
Iola’s quaint charm reveals its era: Chapman’s Big Little Store, Dunlap’s flop house, Jernigan’s Standard. It’s the natural world that permeates the atmosphere, however. Read evokes her native mountains and river with a love and grace reminiscent of Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing.
While the opening chapters portray first love with a vivid luminosity and the ending echoes the beginning with an equally momentous encounter, the mid-novel pacing occasionally flags. This, however, is a trifling quibble, when the book overall is riveting in its portrayal of love, loss and survival in the wild, the dangers of racism, maternal instinct, female bonds, sacrifice and redemption.
On finishing the book, I felt a cliffhanger pang. Did it end too early?
The best fiction is about the truths of being human. Go as a River is certain to be a 2023 best-seller, as much for those truths as for the historical context, natural world, and those glorious peaches.
Afric McGlinchey’s most recent book is Tied to the Wind, a hybrid-memoir (Broken Sleep Books, 2021).
