Go as a River

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Synopsis

Set amid Colorado’s wild beauty, a heartbreaking coming-of-age story of a resilient young woman whose life is changed forever by one chance encounter. A tragic and uplifting novel of love and loss, family and survival—and hope.

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, unknowingly igniting as much passion as danger. When tragedy strikes, Victoria leaves the only life she has ever known. She flees 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.

Synopsis source: The StoryGraph

Review

Genre(s): Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction
HB&W Rating: 4 stars
View on StoryGraph, Goodreads
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I really enjoyed this. It was a shorter novel but no less impactful for it. The writing style reminded me of William Kent Krueger or Kristin Hannah’s style—slow-burn pacing, complex characters, and emotionally evocative writing.

Victoria was a very complex character—real, raw, and human. While I hated the choices she made at times, I could understand how she reached those decisions and what factors contributed to them: her youthful naivete, her ignorance resulting from growing up without any real worldly experience or education, and the biases and bigotry of the people living in her rural community. I felt her fear and perseverance in the face of surviving on her own in the woods. I felt her desperation and her grief in the clearing after coming down from the hut. I felt her will determination to continue the legacy of her loved ones in the only ways she knew how.

We get a lot of tangential or second-hand experience with racism and bigotry in this book through Victoria and Inga’s perspectives—Victoria’s mostly. I really wished some of this had been fleshed out a bit more either by expanding on Inga’s perspective and weaving it in with Victoria’s more, or, more preferably, by providing Lucas’ POV to get a richer experience. We didn’t’ need two white women explaining racism, though I respect that the author illustrates their awakening to it. Still, what little of Lucas’ story we get through Inga’s letters didn’t feel like enough, and I really would have liked more out of the ending.

While I’d have liked a bit more out of this book, it was a great debut. If you like the type of books about surviving in the wild, or if you enjoy emotionally layered and complex character studies, enjoy historical fiction, or all of the above, I think you’ll enjoy this book.

Until next time,

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