It is 1948. Seventeen-year-old Victoria is on her way to drag her brother home from a poker game. Expecting another ordinary day in the ordinary little town of Iola, she has no idea that she will run into a young drifter named Wil who will change her life forever.

Five years ago, Victoria lost her mother, cousin, and aunt in a tragic accident. The accident propelled Victoria into her mother’s role, a role she never wanted for herself. Victoria is surrounded by men in her life. Her father, her crippled uncle, and her despicable brother. Her life is cooking, housework, and picking peaches from the family orchard.

With her mother dying and never having left the town, Victoria is quite naive and innocent about life. Being 1948, women had very few rights and before she died Victoria’s mother taught her a woman’s domestic role in the world. But she begins to questions why it is all women’s work.

Victoria falls almost instantly for young Wil upon their first encounter. However, Wil is an Indian, and sadly the locals of the town take a xenophobic dislike to the drifter. Their reaction to Wil’s arrival opens Victoria’s eyes to racism. Victoria must keep their meetings secret, even from her family. When their affair is brutally ended, Victoria, heartbroken, escapes to the Colorado wilderness.

This is a beautiful novel about surviving tragic loss and persevering when all hope seems lost. It is about rekindling that hope and finding the strength to accept and adapt to change.

Reviewed by Neale Lucas

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. Go as a River, her first novel, is inspired by the landscape she comes from and will be published in over twenty-five territories.