First published on February 28, 2023, “Go As a River” is the debut novel of Shelley Read. According to the book jacket, Ms. Read “was a senior lecturer at Western Colorado University for nearly three decades, where she taught writing, literature, and environmental studies.” The jacket text also states that she is “a fifth generation Coloradoan who lives with her family in the Elk Mountains of the Western Slope.”
“Go As a River” first came to my attention at a book club meeting in December 2023, when I heard people raving about it, talking about what an excellent book it is, that it had “won a lot of awards” and been touted by Colorado Public Radio, and they were all getting that swoony, dreamy look in their eyes as they rhapsodized about “the beautiful language” and the “excellent story.”
I decided to check it out, so I put a hold on the book at my library. When the novel came in a month later, I saw that there is a Bonnie Garmus quote on the cover: “Completely unforgettable.” I opened the book and immediately began reading, only to find myself completely bored. The writing was neither beautiful, nor lyrical, nor literary. The content reads like Young Adult/YA, with a teenage protagonist who is specifically tagged as clueless and virginally pure looking at a handsome stranger who has just come to town.
The vast majority of this novel is told from the first-person POV of Victoria Nash, and it is clear that the main character is looking back on her life, narrating her tale from a place that is decades in the future. It is sometime in the early fall of 1948 when the novel begins, and the narrator is seventeen years old.
As the stranger and the teenage girl lay eyes on each other, there is an immediate blossoming of true love. In the midst of this spellbinding moment, a doctor’s wife passes Victoria Nash, and the doctor’s wife, who is pushing a baby carriage, is tagged as a “plump” person, and Victoria tells us that she “waddles” on down the sidewalk. This was the first of many fat-scathing comments that are made in the book (with the disabled Uncle Ogden, and Cora Mitchell, especially Cora’s description on page 73, getting the biggest doses). The first of the fat-scathing comments was honestly the death knell of this novel for me, right there on page 10.
I knew that this book was going to be a trashfire for me, and that means: I solely read this novel as a market research read. When I read for market research, I understand that I am reading “for the vibes,” to look at what the book is saying, emotionally, to the people who loved it, because the text is going to divorce itself from objective reality, and be a total tropefest. Clichés, stereotypes, and popular storytelling tropes power this novel. The plot will be pure fantasy, and it will veer into the absurd.
But in that absurdity, it will deliver an emotional reality to the reader that speaks to “the modern vibes” of isolation, loneliness, victimhood, and despair. The label of “historical fiction” allows the text to slip into an imagined past, a past that can be conveniently divorced of any or all objective truths that do not serve the fantasy, a fantasy that is entirely crafted to “deliver the feels” of isolation, loneliness, victimhood, and despair.
This is why “Go As a River,” and other books like it, are labeled “crying books” by other Goodreads reviewers. And I agree with other readers who compared this novel to the works of Kristin Hannah and Delia Owens’ debut bestseller, “Where the Crawdads Sing.” I think those comparisons are entirely apt.
*mild spoilers ahead*
*please stop reading here if you do not want this book to be spoiled, thanks*
I also think Bonnie Garmus’ debut bestseller, “Lessons in Chemistry,” is a great model for assessing Read’s book, because so many of the plot points are similar. A young, unmarried woman loses her lover shortly after they have begun having sexual intercourse, only to realize after his death that she is pregnant with his child, and then the impoverished/luckless/inexperienced/isolated young woman proceeds to go through her entire pregnancy completely alone, and with zero assistance, financial or otherwise, from anyone else. One text begins in 1948, the other in the early 1950s.
“Where the Crawdads Sing” (also historical fiction, initially set in 1952) did not feature a pregnancy out of wedlock, but so many bestselling books do, and so many of Kristin Hannah’s books are specifically centered on (in the author’s own words, in interviews available on YouTube): the power of childbirth to turn a “girl” into a “woman.” Hannah puts a lot of care into making pregnancy and motherhood incredibly isolating and externally horrifying for her protagonists.
And, look: fair enough. This kind of fantasy-pregnancy-survivalist storytelling isn’t my jam, but I understand why this is a jelly du jour of “women’s fiction.”
I’m also totally game for this narrative, so long as the story is realistic, so long as the plot elements don’t veer off into pure fantasy. I enjoy speculative fiction. I just don’t want to read spec fic that is labeled “historical fiction.” I can give authors a lot of leeway to bend history to suit their narrative, but when the story elements take a hard left into nonsense, it honestly breaks my brain.
“Go As a River” has a lot of nonsense. It’s a massive DNF for me, as the reader I am. In a “read for the feels” analysis, I can understand why this book has received so many thousands of five-star gushing reviews, why the movie rights have already been sold, and why this book has a massive following on TikTok.
I’ve already mentioned the carefully penned and utterly relentless fat-scathing that takes place in this text. Let me name a few other big tropes that feature significantly in this book:
1. The trope that Jack A. Nelson identified as “The disabled person as a burden.”
2. Nelson’s identified trope of “The disabled person as maladjusted – his own worst enemy.”
3. Nelson’s identified trope of “The disabled person as unable to lead a successful life.”
4. The Magical Native American trope. A stock character who is mysterious, mystical, imbued with special physical and spiritual powers, but who also cannot save himself from being murdered by two uneducated white working-class hicks who are not even a fraction as intelligent, strong, or adept at survival as he is. The Magical Native in this book is literally named “Wilson Moon” in the text. Yeah. I’m serious. His surname is “Moon.” The invisible dialogue bubbles swarming above my head all exclaimed “WTF!” the moment I saw his name.
5. Human mothers instantly and spiritually bond with each other, because mothers. (Mothers as All-Nurturing Humans trope.)
6. Any nursing mother, when confronted with a hungry infant who is not her own, will instantly and selflessly give that hungry infant her own breast, and feed the baby the breast milk that her own child needs to drink. (Mothers as All-Nurturing Humans trope.)
7. I declare shenanigans on the Paradise Lost trope, which opens the book, because it turns out that Victoria doesn’t give a shit about saving “her homeland” from the government’s flood waters. In the early 1950s, she is the first to sell out (to the government) and get the F out of dodge, and repeatedly tells the reader that she is glad to get out of there, to get away from all of the bad memories and loss that she associates with her hometown of Iola. She’s even glad that the whole town will be destroyed. So this Paradise Lost trope is employed as a bait-and-switch, and I resented that, mightily, with a Kill It With Fire level of rage. Victoria did not “lose her home.” She abandoned it and moved to Paonia, the first chance she got. And the text makes it abundantly clear: her life was MUCH BETTER for it.
Other stuff in this book that is not necessarily a trope, but I see these plot points employed a lot in motherhood-survivalist women’s fiction:
8. Hypothermia does not exist. No one ever dies of the cold, because actual survivalist reality cannot exist in pure fantasy.
9. The reality of food does not exist. In this book, a person can somehow survive for five months at high altitude with nothing more than one backpack’s worth of food. I kid you not. One backpack of food. One single backpack that a seventeen-year-old pregnant girl, who is not a hiker, carries to an abandoned hunter’s shack on her own. For five months of complete isolation survival. In an unheated shack, with no woodstove, no cook stove, and no front door, either. Way up in the mountains, so far away from all other people that no one else so much as crosses that way in over five months. She also brought no gun, no ammunition, and no other hunting supplies with her. Just the single backpack of food, and some vegetable seeds she intends to plant. And people call this book “realistic.” I just cannot with this.
10. The teenage protagonist plants a garden full of root vegetables at a spike camp/abandoned hunter’s shack – which is at extremely high altitude, most likely over 8,000 or 9,000 feet in elevation – in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. The vegetables actually take root and grow. She even grows potatoes and beets at this altitude. She plants and harvests a full garden in what would be very little topsoil over hard rock, most likely limestone and solid granite… at a spike camp. There is not enough WTF in the world for this.
11. It’s 1948/1949, but there is no mention of grizzly bears or cougars threatening the protagonist for the entire five months (April-August) that she lives at the spike camp. For the record, Colorado had a LOT of those predators roaming the mountains during this time period. And those predators DO attack and kill humans, and eat them. But this book is ridiculous, so I’m just adding the complete lack of grizzlies and mountain lions to the overall WTF of Victoria growing potatoes and beets in a half-inch of topsoil at high altitude, and living off a single backpack of food for multiple months (until she can harvest her meager garden offerings), and her complete lack of a heating source to survive the deadly frigid conditions, since hypothermia does not exist.
12. All white men in this book are abusive, emotionally unavailable, murderers, rapists, and/or totally useless. From the sheriff to the fathers, the hired hands to the flop house owners, and especially any woman’s brothers, white men are repulsive and should be avoided at all costs.
13. Shitty parents are never held accountable for being shitty.
14. Evil exists in the world because some children are just born as “bad seeds.” Or, as this novel tells it, they are born with “the darkness” inside of them (see page 43 for the receipts). Thanks, I hate it.
15. Big-t Trauma also makes people evil. (See Uncle Og: disability makes him maladjusted, a “sinister” drunkard, abusive, a useless burden on Victoria’s family, and then he swiftly exits the text altogether, so he can go and be a “freeloader” to his bio mother, and make her life a living hell up in Denver, instead. Also, see Seth: losing his mother sets him firmly on the path of being a racist and a murderer.)
I am going to leave behind mentioning tropes for a moment, and go on a tangent about the historical realities of Durango, Colorado, since a big part of the second half of this novel takes place, not in the Gunnison River valley near the former town of Iola, but in Durango.
In the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s, there were a LOT of Native Americans who lived in and around Durango. The two Indian reservations in Colorado are not far from Durango.
Wilson Moon states that he is from “the Four Corners” region, and then the text later tells us that he ran away from an Indian Boarding School “in Albuquerque.”
Fun fact: Colorado had a LOT of Indian Boarding Schools, doing all manner of evil and completely depraved things – Wilson Moon did not have to be taken to New Mexico to be put in a boarding school – if he was born in the Four Corners area of Colorado, then the State of Colorado had its own evil shit schools to imprison him in.
But Shelley Read doesn’t put this in her book, because she wants to depict Durango the way that her white female readers know Durango, especially the ones who have visited this popular mountain town and ridden on the narrow gauge railroad to Silverton: Durango is a majority-white college town full of progressive people who vote Democratic.
Fun fact: in the 1940s, ’50, and ‘60s, Durango had a huge KKK headquarters and gathering hall right on Main Street, just a couple of blocks from the train station, right in the place where tourists now buy fun t-shirts and mugs and delicious cups of artisanal hot chocolate. This wasn’t a speakeasy-type KKK headquarters, either: it had a huge, helpful sign painted in ginormous letters, advertising itself to all who came to town to do business.
So during the time that Victoria’s half-Native son is growing up in Durango, from 1949-1969/1970, guess what he sees, in Jim Crow Durango: that friendly KKK headquarters, announcing itself right there in downtown.
Fun fact: the uranium in the uranium bomb that was dropped on Japan in 1945 was milled RIGHT THERE in downtown Durango, Colorado, at the big uranium mill that once existed just a short distance away from what is now a white liberal haven of tourists, bookstores, restaurants, and fun retail shops that are totes Colorado proud.
Victoria Nash, who is depicted as being oh so innocent of racism at the start of the novel, would have, in reality, been completely drenched in it. From her angry drunkard Uncle Og, who would no doubt have been spewing vitriol about ‘the Japs and the Jerrys’ he fought and lost his leg and one foot to in the war, to folks in town hating on the POC who inhabited the region in much larger numbers than they do now, Victoria would’ve been well aware that her family despised POC, long before the lone “Injun,” Wilson Moon, arrives in Iola when Torie is seventeen.
Colorado’s own KKK history is erased from the text, as are Colorado’s entirely inhumane boarding schools (many of which have long since been torn down), its uranium mills (again: these things are gone with the wind, erased by the 1990s), and the details of racist shittery that infused Colorado life in the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s.
What Shelley Read offers us instead is that imagined past, that fantasy Colorado that can exist as a blank slate for the modern-day emotional turmoil and motherhood drama her readers face.
And when you solely read for the feels, this book is done well. The text focuses on the horrors of feeling motherless, without any women friends or women kin to help you at all, there is an extreme emotional abandonment in these pages, as well as a horrible experience with puberty that is truly gut-wrenching and sickening, as emotionally disturbing as Wil’s body being dragged until it is skinless behind a car.
There is extreme family betrayal in these pages, without ever being named as such.
The author also gets to reward the book’s fans with a heavy-handed use of the Magical Dick Trope, whereby a woman is healed and brought into her full becoming by the Penis of True Love entering into her vagina. I’ll provide the receipts:
“In his arms, I became all the things it had never occurred to me to be before we met. I was beautiful and desirable and even a little dangerous. I was away from the farm overnight, a woman making choices and taking risks rather than an obedient and timid girl.” (p. 83)
“…. his caress had restored not only my [sprained] ankle but something deep inside me I had not fully known was ailing.” (p. 83)
“Our bodies glided together in exquisite unison, knowing exactly how to move and where to touch, even though physical love was new to us both.” (p. 85)
If those quotes speak to your feels, and ignite the full potency of the Magical Dick Trope, then more power to you. For me, this is not working. It just makes me more and more aggravated with this book.
As to Victoria being able to give birth, resuscitate her apparently stillborn infant, and then successfully nurse him with no instruction, no assistance, no guidance at all (other than the spirit of the dead Wilson Moon showing her how to get the baby’s heart to start pumping and his lungs to start working), with no food to eat for two weeks after giving birth at her spike camp at high altitude – I guess this is just more of the “gritty realism” so many other readers adored in this book, and frequently cite in their five-star gushing reviews.
Now, if anyone five-starred this book and is reading my three-star review, finding themselves deeply offended by my take on this novel, I am truly sorry.
Because my single biggest beef with this book is the master trope I have not even mentioned so far, and that is the unnamed, unconscious Madonna/Whore complex that fuels this whole story.
Victoria abandons her baby two weeks (or so) after birth, and this is framed as “an honest act” in the text (p. 151). As Victoria directly states to the reader: “I knew it had been an honest act to lay my baby down.”
Then the text makes it abundantly clear that Victoria had other options. Namely: she could’ve lived with Ruby-Alice the whole time, in her house in the pine trees, as it’s called. Ruby-Alice feeds Victoria in secret, after she returns to Iola, and restores her to full health before she goes home.
Victoria arrives home to discover that her father has sent away the evil “freeloader,” Og, and her evil murdering brother, Seth, is long gone. It turns out, her father desperately missed her the whole time she was away, and even made himself sick with pneumonia looking for her for months.
What is left, completely unsaid in the text, is the real reason that Victoria gave her baby away: that she didn’t want anyone to know she was having sex, that she was being a whore, and that she “got caught,” as that cruel expression very much existed in the 1940s. Sans baby, Victoria gets to return home a Good Girl, a young woman who is still worthy of her daddy’s respect. Which also means: she’s still worthy of inheriting her daddy’s property: the house, the farm, and all of the personal effects that go with it. And let it be said: Victoria very much wants the family farm.
All of this material is so nonexistent in this book that my opinion pretty much makes no sense in any literal read of the text. If a reader read this book for the feels, then what I am stating is simply wrong-headed and malicious, and I probably seem like I am “pulling crap out of nowhere” in a completely unfounded attack on this book.
Well, so be it. The five-star lovers of this book are welcome to their opinion, and I am very much welcome to mine.
I believe that it is the complete hiding away of the Madonna/Whore reality infusing this book that gives the novel its greatest power. Victoria gets to remain both innocent of sex (until she has it), and then gets to be hell-bent on escaping the stain of sex (hiding her pregnancy and the baby from Iola entirely) while never confessing to the reader that this is exactly what she is doing.
Instead of telling the reader that she is escaping the stain of the whore, the fall from love and lovability that being a whore entails, Victoria instead frames the baby’s abandonment as “an honest act.” Her victimhood status is securely maintained, which keeps the book’s emotional themes (as a crying book) running at full throttle.
Women’s fiction is often denigrated as not being “literature,” and I want to say this: if Shelley Read had been honest about what Victoria is doing in this book, I could call this book literature. Even with all of the fantasy silliness of the high-altitude garden and the surviving for five months on one backpack of food. Even with the Magical Native trope and the fat-scathing and the horrible “freeloader” depiction of “sinister” Og. Real emotional truth is compelling, and offensive storytelling tropes exist in so many Pulitzer winners, Nobel Prize winners, Man Booker Prize winners, etc. Readers love stereotypes and brutally offensive tropes in their fiction; this stuff is often what “makes the medicine go down” when authors say something non-tropey and honest in their books.
But “Go As a River” read as the worst kind of fantasy for me: the fantasy that traffics in offensive tropes without offering the reader any real insight on its main character’s deepest truths.
I know that Shelley Read sees herself as doing just that, however: of giving her readers insight into identity. Here is a quote from an interview with Read on October 16, 2023, in the Naples Daily Times:
“I’m interested in what lies beneath the surface of each character’s identity and how an authentic self can be revealed – particularly through change, loss, and lessons from the natural world.”
A noble intent for her work. But I would categorize “Go As a River” as a modern woman’s emotional catharsis that is completely disinterested in the actual “natural world” of Colorado, and disconnected from an accurate depiction of the cultural reality that the main character is operating within, both internally and externally, from 1948 through 1971.
Negative stars, for me personally. This book was DNF-worthy, less than ten pages in, and I would not recommend it.
Three stars because I know I am not the right reader for this.
Highly recommended to anyone who 5-starred “Where the Crawdads Sing,” “The Help,” “American Dirt,” “The Four Winds,” “The Bear and the Nightingale,” and pretty much anything picked as a Reese Witherspoon’s book club pick.
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*Footnote to this review:
I want to take a moment to examine a passage of text from the book that I find extremely problematic, especially in view of this novel “winning a lot of awards” and being optioned for film, etc.
The passage begins at the bottom of page 47, and continues through most of page 48. Victoria is sharing her adult (post-1971) reflections on her disabled uncle Og, who the reader is informed lost most of one leg and an entire foot during combat in WWII.
“As I was finishing the dishes, I heard Uncle Og’s wheelchair creaking back down the hallway. The more weight he gained, the more the chair groaned, and the more sweat he worked up trying to move himself around the house. I expected the chair to someday split down the middle, dumping him cursing to the floor, each wheel fleeing as if finally freed from the displeasure of Og’s constant company.
A teacher once told me that President Roosevelt had a wheelchair, presumably similar to Og’s, with a wooden back and long planks ending in feet like two stiff legs of its own. Roosevelt never allowed himself to be photographed or publicly seen in the chair, my teacher said, a facade so well maintained that few people believed the rumor of his disability. He looked so presidential in newspaper photographs, and he spoke with power and eloquence on the radio. He even drove a fine automobile in parades and processions. I had never known anyone crippled until Og came back broken and mean from the war. The new Ogden bore no resemblance to the old, let alone to the only president I had ever known. It was not until long after both Roosevelt and Og had passed away and wheelchairs were no longer made of wood that I saw one of only two known photographs of the president in his chair, and I wondered how many war veterans, legless and miserable like Og, might have suffered a little bit less had the president not hidden his chair in shame.”
First, there is some ugly revisionist history taking place in this text, since Victoria does not attend school past age seventeen, meaning that one of her schoolteachers before 1948 shared the full extent of Roosevelt’s disability with her in a classroom. I don’t find that historically accurate at all.
For decades after Roosevelt’s death, huge numbers of Americans still had no idea that FDR had required use of a wheelchair. If the full extent of Roosevelt’s disability was kept such a well-guarded secret for so many years after his death, I very much doubt that Victoria Nash, growing up in Iola, Colorado, in the 1930s and ‘40s, had a schoolteacher who somehow knew the full extent of the President’s disability, and that this teacher was sharing this “rumor” with elementary and middle school students.
Victoria never mentions attending high school in Iola, and when the novel begins, there is no mention of her attending school whatsoever. She is already working full time at the farm: spending all day, every day, cooking and cleaning for her father, Og, and Seth, and helping to harvest the peaches and sell them at her father’s roadside stand. Victoria states that she has never had any friends, and it is clear that no one at the high school in Iola misses her, or believes she should still be attending classes at all.
I can only guess that Shelley Read herself, at some point in her life, had a teacher mention to her that FDR used a wheelchair, and decided to slip this fact into Victoria’s POV.
The resulting revisionist disability analysis is deeply offensive. Much like the difficult work of anti-racism, work that is NOT to be placed solely onto the POC in America to perform for white people, the same is true for dismantling the abuses of ableism. Able-bodied adults like Victoria should not be putting all of the work advancing rights and mental health assistance for the disabled community solely on disabled people to do. But that is exactly what Victoria does in this book.
As to the 1930s and ‘40s, the hard truth is: FDR lived in a completely ableist society, an ableist society that was NOT of his own making, and he knew very well that he would NEVER be elected President of the U.S. if the American public knew that he needed a wheelchair.
To suggest that FDR hid his chair “in shame,” and is therefore to blame for the self-loathing that “legless” war veterans face when they are suddenly in need of a wheelchair, is some intensely loathsome commentary that makes me hate this book with a Kill It With Fire level of rage.
Victoria has also led an extremely privileged life, to believe that only “legless” war veterans are in need of a wheelchair. It’s almost as if the polio that disabled FDR wasn’t still a deadly menace in the years when Victoria was a child growing up, and well into her early adulthood, before the first polio vaccine was created by Jonas Salk in the mid-1950s.
Oh wait, never mind. I’m actually taking the book more seriously as historical fiction than the book takes itself. Polio doesn’t exist as a health menace for Victoria because it doesn’t exist as a health menace to Shelley Read. In the imagined past of Read’s 1948 Colorado, schoolchildren like Victoria are being taught about FDR’s wheelchair use, but have no knowledge or fear of polio, and never witness anyone disabled by polio, or any other disability from infectious disease, birth condition, or accident (especially not any farm accidents), because the only thing that can cause disability in Shelley Read’s life is, apparently, serving in armed combat.
Thanks, I hate it. I hate this book so much.
Also, Truman was President in 1948, so FDR was not, in fact, “the only president [Victoria] had ever known.” This entire book just feels needlessly ignorant.
Negative stars.
Thought Candy 