Once Upon a River
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- ¥640
発行者による作品情報
A girl with a gun fights for survival in the American wilderness, in a tale that will enthral fans of The Hunger Games and True Grit.
After the violent death of her father, in which she is complicit, Margo takes to the Stark River in her boat, with only a few supplies and a biography of Annie Oakley, in search of her vanished mother.
But the river, Margo’s childhood paradise, is a dangerous place for a young woman travelling alone, and she must be strong to survive, using her knowledge of the natural world and her ability to look unsparingly into the hearts of those around her. Her river odyssey through rural Michigan becomes a defining journey, one that leads her beyond self-preservation and to deciding what price she is willing to pay for her choices.
Reviews
‘With all the fixings of a Johnny Cash song — love, loss, redemption — Campbell captures these Michiganders and their earthy, brutal paradise in a tale rich with insight’ Elle
‘An excellent American parable about the consequences of our favorite ideal, freedom.” – Jane Smiley, The New York Times
Irresistible… As her odyseey unfolds, through encounters with the men she meets along the way—brawlers, boatmen, drug dealers, trappers—she tries to sort out what it means to have the power to end a human life when you’ve hardly begun your own.”— The New Yorker
‘ … the self-reliant teenage heroine of Once Upon a River made the book a beguiling and addictive read … reminiscent of Winter Bone’s Ree Dolly or The Hunger Games’ Katnis Everdeen … fascinating … I found myself drawn to the pace of Campbell’s narrative as well as the haunting descriptions of the Stark River.’ Stylist
‘Vivid and mesmerizing…a gripping story’ Entertainment Weekly
‘Margo’s earthy education and the profound complexities of her timeless dilemmas are exquisitely rendered and mesmerizingly suspenseful. A glorious novel destined to entrance and provoke.’ Starred review, Booklist
‘Campbell’s precise eye for detail makes her descriptions of Margo’s travels utterly convincing, showing her readers that the loves of humans are as closely intertwined with the natural world as the emotions of love and hate’ We Love this Book
About the author
Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of three previous books, including ‘American Salvage’, a National Book Award finalist.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her follow-up to National Book Award finalist American Salvage, Campbell trains her unflinching eye on Margo Crane, a down-on-her-luck 16-year-old living in late 1970s rural Michigan who is, in rapid succession, abandoned by her mother, raped by her uncle, and witness to the shooting death of her father. An accomplished marksman who worships Annie Oakley, Margo takes off, traveling up the Stark River and struggling to survive on her own, having been once again rejected by her mother. Encountering a progression of strangers, both kind and otherwise, Margo is a modern-day pioneer whose steely resolve is matched only by her guarded need for tenderness. Forced to kill a man in a moment of panic, Margo must learn to forgive those who have hurt her in order to forge a new and better life for herself. Working against the backdrop of a beautiful but unforgiving landscape, Campbell juxtaposes spare prose with lush details in this stark chronicle of hardship and splendor, friendship and disappointment, and families undone and reunited, and though the novel occasionally flags under the crushing burden of Margo's unremitting ill fortune, it is, finally, a fine and sobering story with more than a little Winter's Bone style grit in it.
