MICHELE NORRIS, host: In her latest novel "Once Upon a River," writer Bonnie Jo Campbell takes at least one liberty with her native Michigan. She adds a river, the Stark River. Well, our reviewer Alan Cheuse recommends you add her book to your summer reading list.
ALAN CHEUSE: The Stark River, Campbell writes of her invented central Michigan setting, flowed around the oxbow at Murrayville the way blood flowed through Margo Crane's heart. She rowed upstream to see wood ducks, canvasbacks and ospreys and to search for tiger salamanders in the ferns. She drifted downstream to find painted turtles sunning on fallen trees and to count the herons in the heronry beside the Murrayville Cemetery. When Margo swam, she swallowed minnows alive and felt the Stark River move inside her.
What a lovely way to begin our own journey through this engaging novel. Upstream, downstream, this young heroine wants to make her own way. Though because of all this a reader may immediately conjure up the association with Huck Finn, Margo herself has a real-life hero in the figure of sharpshooting Annie Oakley. She, like her idol, has a knack for target shooting, a skill that changes her young life when, after she's raped by her uncle, she shoots him in his privates. This leads almost immediately to the death of her father.
Her mother has already abandoned her. And with her father gone, Margo sets out to make a life for herself on the aptly named Stark River. She skins fish, cooks ducks, beds down in the raw elements, makes friends, hides from enemies, mourns for her father, searches for her mother, takes lovers, which, at least, when she first starts out, turns all the men she sleeps with into statutory rapists and turns her into the most realistic underage runaway in modern fiction. And she sometimes shoots to kill. The novel itself is quite a piece of killer fiction.
NORRIS: The book is "Once Upon a River" by Bonnie Jo Campbell. Our reviewer Alan Cheuse teaches writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
