Go as a River by Shelley Read

March 2023

GO AS A RIVER by Shelley Read is set in a place that is very special to me --- the Gunnison Valley of Colorado. I have spent a lot of time there, and it’s where I met my husband, who, like me, hails from New Jersey.

In 1948, Torie is a lonely teenage girl caring for her father, uncle and brother following a car accident that killed her mother, favorite aunt and cousin. They live in the town of Iola. School already is behind her, though she normally would be of high school age. With her father and brother, she tends the family’s peach farm when she is not cooking and running the household. And yes, we can stop here for a second, as I never knew that peaches grew in Colorado. In an interview with Shelley, she said that she had not known about Georgia peaches!

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Shelley Read, author of Go as a River

Seventeen-year-old Victoria Nash runs the household on her family’s peach farm in the small ranch town of Iola, Colorado. Wilson Moon is a young drifter with a mysterious past, displaced from his tribal land. Victoria encounters Wil by chance on a street corner, a meeting that profoundly alters both of their young lives, unknowingly igniting as much passion as danger. When tragedy strikes, Victoria leaves the only life she has ever known. She flees into the surrounding mountains where she struggles to survive in the wilderness with no clear notion of what her future will bring. As the seasons change, she also charts the changes in herself, finding in the beautiful but harsh landscape the meaning and strength to move forward and rebuild all that she has lost, even as the Gunnison River threatens to submerge her homeland.

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Owen King, author of The Curator

It begins in an unnamed city nicknamed “the Fairest.” It is distinguished by many things, from the river fair to the mountains that split the municipality in half; its theaters and many museums; the Morgue Ship; and, like all cities, its essential unmappability. Dora has a secret desire --- to find where her brother went after he died, believing that the answer lies within The Museum of Psykical Research. With the city amidst a revolutionary upheaval, Dora contrives to gain the curatorship of the half-forgotten museum only to find it all but burnt to the ground, with the neighboring museums oddly untouched. She is offered one of these, The National Museum of the Worker. However, neither this museum, nor the street it is hidden away on, nor Dora herself, are what they at first appear to be.

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