Seventeen-year-old Victoria Nash has spent years running her family's peach farm in rural Colorado after her mother's death — capable, dutiful, and largely unseen. Then a brief, tender love affair with a young Ute man sets her life on an entirely different course, one marked by loss, displacement, and a hard-won search for home. A story about what it means to lead your life like a river — gathering and flowing, finding a way forward even when the waters are dammed.
My Review
The past five years, seventeen-year-old Victoria Nash has been relegated to running the household on her family’s peach ranch after her mother’s untimely death. As the only living female in her family, this responsibility is expected, without question.
Victoria doesn’t have time to dream of a life outside the family ranch. This changes when she meets Wilson Moon, a stranger passing through town. She’s attracted to his kindness, his unique looks, and believes they’re meant to be together.
The love they share is risky but the lessons Wilson teaches Victoria about the flow of the river will sustain her through her hardships, ease the pain of her losses, and guide her to find her niche in life.
Go as a River is a Historical Fiction story that has a different feel to it. It’s a woman’s story, but there’s so much more. The four decades of the 20th century it’s set in, the small rural Colorado community and location, the tedious and arduous pace of ranch-life, and the images the author’s writing creates and stirs in my head are ones I couldn’t stop thinking about.
It’s hard to believe Go as a River is a debut novel. The writing is beautifully picturesque, despite a flicker of purple-prose in the beginning chapters that softens as the story progresses. The characters are well-developed and diverse, the setting is so well-described that you visualize the rugged terrain of the mountains, feel the heat of the sun, and smell the ripeness of the warm peaches the author writes about so lovingly.
Topics of racism and prejudice are depicted as harsh as the landscape of the Colorado wilderness and coalesce to feel as deep and frigid as the Gunnison River. Victoria is both resilient and brave and as her memory intently holds Wilson’s words “Go as a river”, she knows she is meant to always move forward with her life to find a better way.