#BlogTour: Go As A River by Shelley Read @DoubledayUK @RandomTTours #GoAsARiver #ShelleyRead #RandomThingsTours

Book Synopsis:

On a cool autumn day in 1948, Victoria Nash delivers late-season peaches from her family’s farm set amid the wild beauty of Colorado. As she heads into her village, a dishevelled stranger stops to ask her the way. How she chooses to answer will unknowingly alter the course of both their young lives.

So begins the mesmerising story of split-second choices and courageous acts that propel Victoria away from the only home she has ever known and towards a reckoning with loss, hope and her own untapped strength.

Gathering all the pieces of her small and extraordinary existence, spinning through the eddies of desire, heartbreak and betrayal, she will arrive at a single rocky decision that will change her life for ever.

GO AS A RIVER is a heart-wrenching coming-of-age story and a drama of enthralling power. Combining unforgettable characters and a breathtaking natural setting, it is a sweeping story of survival and becoming, of the deepest mysteries of love, truth and fate.

My Review:

Go As A River is a beautiful, absorbing and thought provoking read that I thoroughly enjoyed.

The reader is quickly drawn into the story and into the world Tori lives in. We are introduced to a small, backwater town where prejudices run deep and nothing much has changed for generations. It’s a way of life few of us have experienced, living off the land and being beholden to the weather for the crops to grow or fail.

Tori’s world is small and she’s busy from morning to night with hardly any rest or time for fun. I really felt for her and wished I could somehow help her and be her friend. The roles she fulfils in the house are ones that the women of the house have fulfilled for generations and as such I really admired her strength to want more for herself. The terrible choices she’s forced to make were very emotional to read about and made me cry as I read. However I loved that she follows her heart and finds her way back to where she’s mean to be.

I thought this book has a great pace to it and I found it very hard to put down in places. There were parts of the story I wished would go on forever and others which I felt went on a tad too long but maybe if other parts had been embellished it would have made it a completely different story. It was lovely to see Tori grow up, stand up for herself and get the ending I really wanted for her.

Huge thanks to Anne Cater for inviting me onto the blog tour and to the publisher for my copy of this book. If you’re looking for a beautiful coming of age story, that stays with you I definitely recommend this book.

About The Author:

Shelley Read is a fifth generation Coloradoan who lives with her family in the Elk Mountains of the Western Slope. She was a Senior Lecturer at Western Colorado University for nearly three decades, where she taught writing, literature, environmental studies, and Honors, and was a founder of the Environment & Sustainability major and a support program for first-generation and at-risk students. Shelley holds degrees in writing and literary studies from the University of Denver and Temple University’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing. She is a regular contributor to Crested Butte Magazine and Gunnison Valley Journal, and has written for the Denver Post and a variety of publications.