📖 Featured Book of the Month ~ Go As A River by Shelley Read

 

Doubleday Books
Transworld
13 April 2023

My thanks to the publisher for my copy of this book

On a cool autumn day in 1948, Victoria Nash delivers late-season peaches from her family's farm set amid the wild beauty of Colorado. As she heads into her village, a dishevelled stranger stops to ask her the way. How she chooses to answer will unknowingly alter the course of both their young lives.

So begins the mesmerising story of split-second choices and courageous acts that propel Victoria away from the only home she has ever known and towards a reckoning with loss, hope and her own untapped strength.

Gathering all the pieces of her small and extraordinary existence, spinning through the eddies of desire, heartbreak and betrayal, she will arrive at a single rocky decision that will change her life for ever.

📖 My Review..

Victoria Nash lives with her somewhat depleted family in the isolated beauty of a peach farm in rural Colorado. That her life is bleak and without meaning is evident from the very start, she toils ceaselessly often without thanks and certainly without love. The beautiful moment when she meets a charismatic stranger opens her heart to a world of possibility but it also heralds catastrophic change in the lives of those around her.

I think Go As a River is one of the saddest books I have read for some time and yet it is as beautiful as it is poignant. The writing so wonderfully lyrical that I had to stop and re-read whole sentences because they were just so descriptive. And as the tangled wilderness of the Colorado hills are laid open so we enter deep in to Victoria's soul as she faces tragedy on such a huge scale that it's impossible to comprehend the effect that this deep sadness has on her life going forward.

The story had such a profound effect on me that even now, days after finishing Go As A River, I am still imagining life with Victoria Nash, her bravery and beauty will live on forever in this lovely story.  I have no hesitation in making Go As A River Featured Book of the Month for May.

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 Honors, 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.

Twitter #ShelleyRead #GoAsARiver

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