Go As A River is a haunting story of a young woman coming of age in a home full of toxic men who have recently returned from WW2. Victoria lives on a peach farm near the Gunnison River in Iola which was famously flooded to create the Blue Mesa Reservoir.
Through a series of heart wrenching events, Victoria is forced to flee and start a new and solitary life with the hope of starting her own peach farm far from home. There will be comparisons to Where the Crawdads Sing for the beautiful nature writing but this story is much more.
There are many themes that will appeal to a wide swath of readers. Grief and how that grief is carried throughout life, what it means to be a woman in the world, the peace of nature juxtaposed with the horrors of war that shaped the men in the book, and love for a friend, for one forbidden, and for the land. But perhaps my favorite theme in the book was displacement.
The reader will find this in the residents of the town of Iola, in Wil, the love of Victoria’s life who happens to be indigenous and displaced from his ancestral home, in Victoria as she starts her adult life with little help, and even with the peach seeds that Victoria takes with her from home. In these seeds we find the metaphor of resilience in new soil and how the peaches grow against all odds with the knowledge passed down among generations of Colorado peach growers.
I have met the author several times and she is a gracious and kind woman who is most at home among the mountains of the western slope of Colorado. Read told me she was inspired to write a novel one day while hiking in Gunnison County. She encountered a doe and locked eyes with her. Read knew she wanted to have her main character experience this and writes about it on page 126. I want to read a few sentences from the book that describe this event.
“A doe appeared on the meadow’s edge, tiptoeing from the aspens. She straightened her neck in surprise, blinked, and lightly stamped her feet, unsure what to make of me. Her black eyes glistened and blinked again, and her white tail feathered back and forth in indecision. Still as stone, I gazed at her. I had seen many animals since my arrival but this doe was the first to seem as interested in me as I was in her. We locked eyes for a long while. The doe turned gracefully back the way she had come and pranced out of sight. Seconds later, she reappeared, followed by a delicate spotted fawn. I gasped at the simple beauty, and they looked toward me in perfect unison.”
Read was a senior lecturer at Western Colorado University for nearly three decades before fulfilling her dream of writing her debut novel. Bonnie Garmus, author of Lessons in Chemistry calls the book “completely unforgettable” and I haven’t hand sold it to a person who didn’t love it. Until the next episode of A Likely Story, I wish you a pile of good books and a cozy reading spot.
