March 21, 2024

Go As A River by Shelley Read

Set on a Colorado peach farm, this book far exceeded my expectations. I enjoy family sagas, but often I don’t remember them beyond the last page. This one will stay with me–both for the excellent descriptive writing, but also because of the characters and their resilience and strength.

Victoria’s mother died in a car crash, and at age 17 she is left to run the household, which includes her hardworking and unsympathetic father, wild and mean and alcoholic brother, and a paralyzed war veteran uncle. She falls in love, almost at first sight, with Wilson Moon, a Native American, and this is not acceptable in racist 1948.

I am tempted to tell you more, but, instead, I hope you will read this debut novel.

There he stood and eyed me so long I thought I’d melt like chocolate in the last rays of sun reaching lost across the porch. He said nothing, but I felt as if he knew impossible things about me. He moved closer. I took my first deep smell of him, musky and sharp and strangely inviting, and stared for an instant into his bottomless dark eyes.

p. 15.

But it is often the small fateful twist that alters our lives most profoundly–the beckoning cry of a coal train whistle, a question from a stranger at an intersection, a brown bottle lying in the dirt. Try as we might to convince ourselves otherwise, the moments of our becoming cannot be carefully plucked like the ripest and most satisfying peach from the bough. In the endless stumble toward ourselves, we harvest the crop we are given.

p. 18.

I had chosen to meet on these shores because my rising wisdom understood that I must carry my whole past alongside the new space I had created in myself for hope.

p. 300.

Happiness Falls by Angie Kim

I zoomed through this book. The basic story is unremarkable, a plot line that has been used many times: a father has gone missing. That’s where the similarities to other missing person stories ends. First, this is a biracial Korean American family. The father has become a stay at home Dad, which means his brilliant wife can pursue her career in linguistics. They have three children, 20 year old twins, John and Mia, and also Eugene, age 14, who is autistic and has a rare genetic condition, Angelman syndrome, and cannot speak.

Eugene returns to the house when only Mia is there. He is wild, out-of control, and bloody. The father does not return from their outing. As the investigation begins, the family wonders if the father has a secret life, and the police seem to think Eugene has harmed his father. LOTS of twists and turns, and the book begins to develop a true crime feel. In part that is because Mia, who is the story’s narrator, includes footnotes in the text, along with an occasional chart, as well as analyzing her father’s research into “happiness.”

The only thing that irritated me a bit about the book was frequent statements like, “If only I had known…” or “We would soon realize we should have…” or “it didn’t occur to me until later that…”

Even as the plot kept me intrigued, I was fascinated by the philosophical reference to the importance of language. For example, this footnote:

19 It’s a common mistake, saying verbal to refer to oral speech. It’s a pet peeve of mine when people say ‘verbal, not written,’ because written is verbal. So why do we call non speakers ‘nonverbal,” use the label ‘nonverbal autism’? It leads to the unwarranted assumption that those people are wholly without words. I’ve brought this matter up to people, and they dismiss it as ‘just semantics.’ But sometimes semantics matter. Words matter. They influence our thinking.

p. 229.

Kim has written another novel Miracle Creek, by the way, which received critical acclaim and a handful of awards. TBR anyone?

An Invitation

Is plot or character more important to you? I would love to know.