Once Upon a River: A Novel
Bonnie Jo Campbell has created an unforgettable heroine in sixteen-year-old Margo Crane, a beauty whose unflinching gaze and uncanny ability with a rifle have not made her life any easier. After the violent death of her father, Margo takes to the river in search of her mother with only a biography of Annie Oakley to her name. Her river odyssey through rural Michigan becomes a defining journey, one that leads her beyond self-preservation and to deciding what price she is willing to pay for her choices.
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Community Reviews
Margo Crane is a 15-year-old growing up along the Stark River, a fictional area based in central Michigan. She loves the outdoors, and lives for hunting and fishing and being on the river. Her idol is Annie Oakley, and she is an expert shooter.
Her mother Luanne has left, so it's just Margo and her dad, along with her aunt and uncle and cousins who live just across the way.
Starting on Thanksgiving, a series of "unfortunate events" start the unraveling of Margo's life, and she is forced to go it alone, setting out on her boat on the river, hoping to find her mother. Hers is a mostly solitary existence, but she's also looking for love, and just when she thinks she's found it, trouble finds her again, so she packs up and moves on.
As she's still making her way towards Kalamazoo, where she thinks her mother may be living, she ends up meeting an old man, "Smoke," who is wheelchair-bound, and dying of emphysema, and his buddy "Fishbone." Along with Smoke's dog, Nightmare, they end up becoming her makeshift family.
My favorite quote from the book is when Margo is talking to Smoke, telling him she's still trying to figure out how to live her life, and he tells her: "You've got every right to try to live any goddamned idiotic way you want to."
[The only thing I didn't like about this book was, of course, I could've lived without the step-by-step description, in graphic detail, of how to kill and skin every kind of animal that lives along the river. UGH!]
Her mother Luanne has left, so it's just Margo and her dad, along with her aunt and uncle and cousins who live just across the way.
Starting on Thanksgiving, a series of "unfortunate events" start the unraveling of Margo's life, and she is forced to go it alone, setting out on her boat on the river, hoping to find her mother. Hers is a mostly solitary existence, but she's also looking for love, and just when she thinks she's found it, trouble finds her again, so she packs up and moves on.
As she's still making her way towards Kalamazoo, where she thinks her mother may be living, she ends up meeting an old man, "Smoke," who is wheelchair-bound, and dying of emphysema, and his buddy "Fishbone." Along with Smoke's dog, Nightmare, they end up becoming her makeshift family.
My favorite quote from the book is when Margo is talking to Smoke, telling him she's still trying to figure out how to live her life, and he tells her: "You've got every right to try to live any goddamned idiotic way you want to."
[The only thing I didn't like about this book was, of course, I could've lived without the step-by-step description, in graphic detail, of how to kill and skin every kind of animal that lives along the river. UGH!]
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