After River
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4.3 • 14 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Until she was 15, Natalie Ward believed her world was perfect and that her family would always be together on the small dairy farm carved out of a remote mountain valley in Southern British Columbia. Then came River, the American draft dodger who became her family’s hired hand the summer that a new highway opened the valley to the larger world beyond. But thirty-five years after River’s arrival, the Ward family is shattered. With her mother dying, Natalie must return to the home she has spent her entire adult life running from, as the family’s dark secrets and betrayals threaten to scar a new generation. Evoking Mary Lawson’s Crow Lake and Carol Shields’ Unless, Milner renders characters who are achingly human and plots a story with masterful precision. After River eloquently captures the moral and social upheavals of the late ’60s and marks the emergence of a dazzling Canadian talent.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this debut from Canadian Milner, a nostalgia as \x93rich and sweet as... freshly churned butter\x94 belies the lingering bitterness of family tragedy. Natalie Ward is a thrice-married writer forced by the imminent death of her mother to return to the town she left in shame at the age of 16. She recounts her golden childhood growing up on a busy farm \x93carved out of a narrow mountain valley deep in the Cascade Mountains.\x94 But when a handsome Vietnam War resister named River Jordon ambles up the family's dirt road in 1966 and offers his services as a farm hand, this innocent simplicity begins to curdle. The Ward family quickly falls in love with River, each finding some essential need filled by his gentle personality, but these bonds drag the family deep into tragedy. The frequent evocation of long-past shocking events is used to drive this story, but when those events are finally revealed they seem slightly artificial, and the author relies on clich d notions of \x93the healing balm of letting go\x94 to imply that in the end, though \x93life is messy... it all comes out in the wash.\x94 Despite these oversimplifications, this novel's solidly crafted settings and characters, blended with optimism, make it a charming if sometimes over-sugary read.
