Once Upon a River - Hardcover

Campbell, Boonie Jo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393079899 ISBN 13: 9780393079890

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2020

Synopsis

From the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist an odyssey of a novel about a girl's search for love and identity.

About this title

Review:

This is a splendid story of survival in extremis, with a searingly original heroine.

It is, rather, an excellent American parable about the consequences of our favorite ideal, freedom.

Campbell is a bard, a full-throated singer whose melodies are odes to farms and water and livestock and fishing rods and rifles, and to hardworking folks who know the value of life as well as the randomness of life's troubles.--Lisa Schwarzbaum

With all the fixings of a Johnny Cash song--love, loss, redemption--Campbell captures these Michiganders and their earthy, brutal paradise in tales rich with insight and well worth the trip.--Natasha Clark

Starred Review. A dramatic and rhapsodic American odyssey. A female Huckleberry Finn. A wild-child-to-caring-woman story as intricately meshed with the natural life of the river as a myth. ...she conveys all that Margo does, thinks, and feels with transfixing sensuous precision, from the jolt of a gun to the muscle burn of rowing a boat against the current to the weight of a man. From killing and skinning game to falling in with outlaws and finding refuge with kind if irascible strangers, 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.

About the Author:

Bonnie Jo Campbell teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific University. The author of Once Upon a River, American Salvage, and Mothers, Tell Your Daughters, she lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2020
• ISBN 10: 0393079899
• ISBN 13: 9780393079890
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 348